So something I've been working on for the past four or so weeks is a project that I've named Chronicles of Darkness - Evennia Support. There's a couple of reasons for this. For one, Thenomain's nWoDCG, while excellent, doesn't support CoD and would require a pretty decent piece of work to update it. For another, even when it does get updated it is not exactly the easiest thing in the world for the addition of information as new expansion books come out. Finally, after diving into Evennia a bit I think it's got a lot of promise since nearly all the commands accessed by players are overwriteable which means even 'core' commands such as 'look' and 'say' can be overhauled to support things such as obfuscate, the hedge, changeling masks, etc.

I've current got a sort of proof of concept copy up and running on AWS and what I could really use are people familiar with Chronicles of Darkness to log in and sort of kick the tires so I can see what falls off (as well as letting me verify that people doing things isn't going to suddenly raise CPU access or memory requirements to crazy amounts).

At present I'm only concentrating on the 'character' aspects. My hope is to make the project available to anyone who wants to use it rather than creating a game myself so I'm not overly focused on things such as Inventory as there are other existing contributions for that. Likewise I don't have any actual commands for changing forms, obfuscating, entering the hedge, etc.

What I do have up and running is character generation for mortals, changelings, vampires, and werewolves along with what I feel are the critical player commands (+sheet, +prove, +pool, +roll, etc.). There is also a system for spending XP (completed characters are issued 75 XP so that the +xp system can be tested as well.

Any help testing the systems would be greatly appreciated, both to let me know where any code may be breaking as well as making sure I haven't messed up aspects of the system that I'm not quite as knowledgeable about (things such as the Ordo Dracul scales and if I've got the ability for werewolves to purchase gifts completely set up correctly).

Access can be reached at 13.52.78.93 port 9999 or through the webclient at http://13.52.78.93/

For a lot of people setting up the basic infrastructure for a new game can be difficult. Downloading the tools appropriate to the operating system to compile a copy of the game server and then compiling it can be a chore. Many games today have an accompanying wiki which then requires additional setup (unless the administrator chooses to use a hosted wiki solution).

The hope is to streamline this process through the use of Docker containers with precompiled images. The name Mocker is a portmanteau of Mux and Docker. A basic installation of Mocker should take only a few minutes and will produce a tinyMux 2.10 server, an apache2 server with mediawiki installed, and a mySQL server to support both of these.

At present the installation will produce a very minimal setup. The tinyMux game has Sandbox Globals installed but nothing else. The wiki is setup with only a single user and no pages. However, it is hoped that if the core project proves the proof of concept that future Mocker releases will include game with fully installed character generation systems and wikis preloaded with templates for things such as character pages, house rules, and logs.

Mocker can be downloaded here. At present it is probably not the most highly secured setup and instructions are very minimal. The whole reason for throwing it out there is so that people can go ahead and download it, find the gaping flaws in security, and complain about how the documentation doesn't provide enough information. That way the gaping flaws can be patched, the documentation can be updated to include the information people need, and more advanced datasets can be implemented. (I'm experimenting at present with building a codebase for Eclipse Phase with most character data being stored in SQL instead of on the character object under a Mocker setup).

Ultimately the goal is to create a sort of 'pop-up' design that will allow people to get a good solid game framework setup in just a few minutes. They may still need to build out their grid and set up staff bits and rules pages but a lot of the technical hurdles will hopefully be overcome allowing people to focus more on the creative issues that need to be addressed.

Feedback is not simply encouraged but desperately needed. It is all too easy to code in a bubble and think that what you're doing is going to cure cancer, bring peace to the Middle East, and cause the final season of Lost make sense, only to find out that what you've done is create the perfect tool for your own tiny edge case and nearly everything you've done will be useless to everyone else. I fully intend to document how I have created the Docker images and what is going on with them so that the project will outlive me, assuming there is interest, and people will be able to create their own quick deploy setups.

@cobaltasaurus said in Miami, Blood in the Water:

. . .why are you still arguing?

Because two players have gotten together to discuss something. That mandates that there be at least three arguments.

@jennkryst No, but the exact context of what the possible outcomes are in physical combat is much more limited (a person can only be knocked out or killed). Additionally you get into issues that it is much more obvious ICly when a person is beaten in physical combat. Lastly, there is just an issue with loss of character agency. Again, yes, there is a certain degree of loss of character agency when you lose a fight but it is just such a different issue.

At the end of the day the results of social combat are far more corrosive to most character concepts than the results of social combat. As an example, I make Joe. Joe is a police officer. His dad was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty and Joe is pretty dedicated to the idea of being a police officer. Joe runs across Sarah who is in the middle of robbing a jewelry store.

If Sarah wants to shoot Joe that hasn't invalidated my concept of Joe because there's always the implicit aspect that any character be overwhelmed by force. If Sarah has some nasty supernatural ability that compels Joe to let her go the concept of Joe hasn't really been violated because again, his letting her go isn't a voluntary action.

On the other hand Joe letting Sarah go because she asked nicely and batted her eyes quite definitely is a violation of Joe's concept. Sure, Sarah's dumped a ton of points onto Presence, Persuasion, Striking Looks, Striking Voice, Seductive Grace, Hypnotic Grace, and Grace Jones but all of these are tools to make someone voluntarily do something and Joe's concept is such that such that he's just not going to voluntarily let Sarah go.

And I suppose that's what it comes down to. At the end of the day social combat often boils down to an 'involuntary voluntary action'. The player has no control over what the character does but the character's actions can't honestly be classified as involuntary. In the case of losing a combat or being mind whammied the end result is an 'involuntary involuntary action', and that is far more acceptable.

@Thenomain said in BSG: Unification:

@faraday

Hey, even most Superhero games don't model super powers that well, because there is always the power-vs-reality issue, whether or not it's physics (in which case "a wizard did it" applies), or ethics (which is not readily solvable).

It depends a little bit about what you are talking about with 'super powers'. Different companies have very different standards for 'super powers'. As an example compare DC in the mid to late 80's in which people like Superman or Green Lantern are capable of moving planets out of orbit while in Marvel the upper limit was the ability to lift around 100 tons (but see below). And then compare both of those with something like Marvel's New Universe which was also a superhero line but in which one of the strongest people on the planet tries to lift a bus only to end up ripping off the bumper, because really, buses aren't made to be supported by their bumper.

And of course all of that can be further complicated by writers doing really poor research. As an example while the strongest characters in Marvel were suppose to max out at lifting around 100 tons they would regularly do things far in excess of that because the writers had no clue how much 100 tons was (a 747 weighs over 3 times that much).

I always thought the Hero Games System (Champions) did a pretty good job of capturing the feel overall for Marvel comics (which was it's target) though it could be a bit math intensive when you were building a superhero.

Of course one big problem that just about every single game system has is 'realism'. Over in the FS3 thread people were complaining about how often an expert character misses in combat. Actually, that's pretty darn realistic. Having done RPGs for close to 4 decades I've seen plenty of articles where people grab honest to goodness actual data from organizations such as police departments and the FBI on shootings (both by civilians and by officers) and have built game systems around that data.

There is often a whole lot of missing going on and combat occurs at an awful lot shorter ranges than people think. When someone does get hit, according to the data, one of three things tends to happen. Either the person is killed outright (which actually doesn't tend to happen as often as people think), the person is immediately incapacitated, or the person keeps right on trucking along carried by adrenaline and barely slows down. When someone is shot 2 dozen times and they are killed it isn't because two dozen moderate injuries added up to something serious. It tends to be because one or two of those two dozen shots killed them outright.

This tends means that in a 'realistic' system players tend to feel like chumps because they are firing and reloading several times before they get any kind of significant hit and during these fights there is a significant chance that they may be killed outright (by significant I don't mean 20% or anything like that but let's just assume the odds are 5% that your character will die in combat. How many fights does the average character have in most game systems?)

In short, realism sucks. The whole reason people play games is to escape from what's real. What you really want are systems that give you 'acceptable' amounts of realism while remaining 'light enough' that they don't drag down game play. The only problem there, of course, is that different people are going to have different definitions of what is 'acceptable' and what is 'light enough'.

@coin said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:

@Carex

I don't know how to say "alien, fantasy cultures do not have to operate under the same psychological logic and behavior that human beings have, because they are alien and fantastical" any other way, so if this is a problem of you not wanting to follow that train of thought, then that's on your and your inability to suspend your disbelief.

Well, the caveat I would argue is that an alien or fantasy culture operates under the logic of its inhabitants and if those inhabitants operate under a logic that we recognize we can largely predict the outcome (e.g. if the inhabitants regard murder as being a bad thing it is a pretty good bet that there will be laws against murder). To make a culture operating under a completely alien system would require the population to operate under a fairly alien logic, which can make things very difficult to play.

With that said, I absolutely don't see things being set up as a 'rape factory'. Societies in which all inheritance is passed through the male line tends to do that because the 'men own everything'. That does not appear to be the case here, however. Everyone who is seeded gets an inheritance. Furthermore, while there is a general genetic advantage for males in archaic melee combat which results in a cultural belief that 'men are the fighters' the nature of the Seeded upends that and creates a system whereby, I assume, the 'strongest warriors' are pretty evenly split between male and female. It is even possible women might hold a slight edge for some reason which could then offset the fact that in the general (non-player) population of Unseeded men would have a slight advantage in force of arms (I am not proposing modifiers to CG to give advantages to one sex or another as PCs do not typify the general population).

As a result it is completely possible for the society to be based largely around a lot of medieval European concepts (in the same way that something like GoT is) while not being a male dominated patriarchy.

So I set myself the task of building a codebase to support Eclipse Phase (mostly so I could get a good feel for the ease or difficulty of coding a stat system using SQL instead of storing the stats on the character object). I'm now at the point where things are seeming pretty solid as far as general gameplay would go (I can pull up a sheet of a character, switch between morphs, stat a character and morph without undo difficulty, and easily retrieve the values for attributes, stats, and skills) and feel like I've made pretty decent progress on CG. A player can set their initial attributes, chose their background and faction, and set their bonuses from at least the common backgrounds pretty easily (there's still some trickiness with Lost and I need to modify the code so that, as an example, if your background lets you chose any two skills to get a +10 bonus you can't apply both bonuses to the same skill).

So as I draw closer to 'feature completion' for the character system I think more and more about actually making a live game. What I would like to do right now is see just how much interest there is in such an idea as well as discuss some more setting specific concepts to gauge reaction.

One thing that I thought about was rather than setting the game on the sprawling grid of the solar system along with the multiple planets that can be reached through the Pandora gates it would be a better idea to have the game centered around some more specific location. This wouldn't be any different from how your average WoD game is set in a given city rather than 'Earth'. I've got half an eye cast toward centering the game around one of the Martian cities, but of course that's one of the big points of feedback that I'm looking for. Mars is a very capitalistic society with free nanofabrication pretty much non-existent, which some people may not like. Obvious combat morphs (such as Reapers) wouldn't be free to just wander around the city any more than a person IRL could just walk around the streets of New York with an assault rifle strapped to their back (that's not to say a player couldn't get their hands on a Reaper morph and sleeve into it before some big combat scene, but you probably aren't going to just be hanging out in a bar in an overt death machine).

Players also would not be Firewall agents since that doesn't seem to make sense in this sort of context. The idea that 'everyone is a Firewall agent' works fine for a tabletop game where the GM is sending half a dozen characters out on missions. For a game where the setting is more open it doesn't seem like it would work and it looks like it might stifle some RP possibilities.

As a possible rules modification I am toying with the idea of replacing the economic (credit) system with something more closely approximating Networking and Reputation. Characters could purchase a 'wealth' stat that functions like reputation regulating what purchases they can attempt and how often while a 'finances' skill would be used to see if the character can actually succeed in the attempt. This would eliminate the bookkeeping of individual credits and better allow people to create 'rich', 'poor', and 'middle class' characters.

@nemesis said in Life... in outer space!:

Would you broadcast your home address on a HAM radio knowing that the signal might be picked up by a psychotic dictator or religious extremist or bored serial killer in the market for fresh meat?

@lithium it isn't that no one can be manipulated. It's that there are very real limits to manipulation, which social combat systems tend to ignore. If Sarah wants to ask Joe if she can cut in line, hey, that's perfectly fine. Frankly I would rather role play the situation rather than roll play it but that's just me.

Additionally, social situations are way more complex than combat. Yes, people can be manipulated, but not in the same way. In a social situation the action that will manipulate person A in the proper direction can actually manipulate person B in the exact opposite direction, making them more resistant than they were. In a fight anyone who gets punched enough goes down. No one becomes more resistant to being knocked out because they've been punched (except maybe The Hulk). It's a matter of biology.

@pyrephox Additionally, the game can take advantage of the fact that it is being run on a computer. Yes, it is headach-y sitting down with a calculator and crunching up all the numbers.

Sitting down and telling the system you want to buy a 10d6 Blast Armor Piercing Blast with 16 charges on an OAF and having it immediately charge you 31 points is an entirely different thing.

@chibichibi That, sadly, I can't do as much about.

@chibichibi Not really any more clunky than D&D or GURPS, once the spell list has been created. At that point all people really need to know is that Flame Bolt costs X points and Summon Raccoon costs Y. They only need to know how to calculate those costs if they are going to propose a new spell.

@chibichibi Maybe look at the Hero Games System. Yes, it is a bit number heavy as well, but at the end of the day it isn't really any more than MtA 2E (and in many ways it can be less because once a 'spell' is created all other players need to do is spend a preset number of points to learn it)

That comes with a few caveats that are actually relatively small. The biggest is that you don't just throw it wide open and let people do whatever they want. There is a super common misconception that that's how the system is suppose to be played. There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a game and saying 'any spells must take the Limitations of Gestures, Incantations, and Requires Skill Rolls' or 'I'm going to veto your spell that creates killer robots as unthematic'.

The second biggest caveat is that creating a 'spell list' could take some time. There's possibly some ways around lightening that load by allowing players to help but there's still going to need to be a decent number of manhours invested by people before players will have a large enough list that they can purchase spells from.

@Botulism Just to throw something into the mix (I apologize since it looks like you're already starting to roll), maybe look at the setting for 'The Strange'. Don't cling too closely to it since I've heard that Monty Cook can be rather tightfisted with his IPs but just the general idea (characters are special individuals who can move between worlds created out of the collective consciousness of humanity and so many worlds are based on fictions, myths, and history).

It really gives a lot of room for the 'world' to move. You can easily justify 'summer camp horror world', 'space quest world', 'cyberpunk world', 'steampunk world', etc. depending on what people want to do at the moment.

@Lotherio Stargirl is being broadcast on CW as well.

CG menus have now been upgraded. They will now longer block the majority of commands (though they do block the inventory command, and replace help and quit with their own versions).

The new CG menus are also bi-directional now (meaning you can back up if you want to). Be aware that at various stages this will require erasing progress in order to prevent things such as a character setting their stats to qualify for a merit and then lowering the stat while keeping the merit.

Finally, the menus now support the ability to quit part way through and will allow you to resume where you left off when you type +cg again.

@TNP I mentioned Trump purely because @Admiral said his idiot of a boss was a supporter. There's a lot of overlap between the non-mask people and Trump supporters but I don't assume that anyone in one camp is automatically in the other.

With that said, Trump's whole attitude of 'I'm not going to wear a mask' machoism really grates on me because he's so protected by everyone around him wearing masks and having constant tests. It's like a general who proves what a tough-guy he is because he refuses to wear body armor even though he's stationed at the Pentagon.

@Admiral said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

It was my new boss. The one who goes on about how the government is evil and oppressing citizens, except that lovely Trump guy who is fixing America.

You mean the guy who is surrounded by staffers wearing masks (anyone not at their desk other than Mike Pence and Donald Trump are required to wear masks) despite the fact that said staffers are tested once per day?

I mean, if this was all a hoax that would mean his hero and idol was either being fooled as well or else didn't have the balls to exert his presidential authority and say 'we're not putting up with this nonsense'.

So which is it? Is your hero stupid, gutless, or are you (your boss) wrong? Doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of other options.

Mage support for C.O.D.E.S. has now been added.

Additionally I was able to resolve the issue with @Rucket being 'locked in' while in CG (default for EvMenus is to do this, but it can be overridden).

At present I am probably going to take a short break on 'adding splats' since Prometheans is the only published 2.0 material remaining to be added and I want to go through and give the character generation and xp menus a bit of an overhaul (making cg bi-directional and able to resume where you leave off as well as better help explanations on the nodes). I also want to work on a couple of 'support' functions such as paging, implementing a bulletin board system, and creating a +request system (which should be helpful with bug tracking).