Best posts made by The Sands

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.

@faraday said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

And that, fundamentally, is the difference in our opinions. You see that as a problem. I see that as the system reflecting reality.
It's January 1st, 2018. You're an expert in Basketweaving - you've got ten years' experience and are a renowned expert. I have taken a few Basketweaving classes but I don't really know what I'm doing. My New Year's Resolution is to become a Basketweaving expert, so I devote all my time to that. While I'm playing catch-up, you decide you are going to take a Zumba class. You do that for a bit then take up Martial Arts. In your spare time you take a couple online Sketching classes.
Fast-forward six months. Have I made an appreciable dent in catching up to you? Probably not. But you've earned a few levels in all those other skills.
The expert will always be ahead of the generalist because they started off awesome.

Except that the expert in a lot of systems won't always be ahead of the generalist. They'll hit a skill cap limit and then the generalist can catch up. This isn't the specialist deciding to take Zumba classes. They can continue to be as focused on their skill as the system will allow and the generalist will catch up because the game is written so there's a cap.

That's not really min-maxing, though. That's an issue with systems having skill caps, something which is often necessary when you use a linear progression system.

With min-maxing your problem is this; Sam the specialist takes Brawl-5 while George the Generalist takes Brawl-2, Drive-1, Weaponry-1, and Firearms-1. Because you are using a linear system at CG it costs the exact same thing either way. Both of them put 5 points into physical skills. However, after CG both characters have earned 9 XP which is spent using the geometric (or at least pseudo-geometric) WoD scale. George spends his 9 XP to buy Brawl-3. Sam spends his 9 XP to buy Drive-1, Weaponry-1, and Firearms-1.

Both characters went through CG. Both characters have earned the same amount of XP. However, Sam has Brawl-5 while George only has Brawl-3 because Sam has taken advantage of a flaw in the system. Other than that they are completely identical.

@arkandel said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

@kanye-qwest My whole life I wanted to play on a Lord of the Rings MU*.

My whole life I have avoided doing so because players will destroy the fond feelings in my heart about the setting.

Honestly, LotR is not necessarily a very good setting. It has a lot of problems similar to Star Wars as a setting (N.B. this isn't a knock on the series. It is an excellent series. I'm simply discussing why it doesn't work well as a MU*).

The problem is that many of the characters in the story are uniquely or at least nearly-uniquely powerful. Gandalf isn't just some human who spent times studying old books. He's a divine being of immense power (but with restrictions on using that power). Aragorn isn't just some guy who spends a lot of time out in the woods. He's one of the last descendants of the Numenorians who were humans who were basically able to look out the window of their homes and see Heaven (and he's not even just a 'regular' Numenorian but is the 'chosen one' of the Numenorians). Legolas is an elf which in Tolkein's setting are all semi-divine beings (they can't even die, instead if their physical form is destroyed they simply wake up in Valinor).

The only reason these guys don't curb stomp Sauron is because Sauron was basically the right hand of Satan and because they are forbidden to by Eru (though they can mitigate Sauron's power so that mankind can chose between good and evil).

All of which works really well for the book but not so much for a MU*. Even for a tabletop game you can handle the 'small group of extremely special characters' but for a MU* you would be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of these types of 'special snowflake+' characters over the life of the game and most likely you would have them confined to a fairly small area of the 'planet' such as a large city.

@Lotherio said in Staff scrutiny during CGen:

If a player makes some concept that infringes on others fun, and the others stop playing with them, and then they do not have fun ... then staff failed to ensure the player has a good time.

This makes a couple of assumptions that I don't think are safe;

Firstly, a player could make a concept that ruins the fun of a group of players but which leave enough people unaffected that the person going through CG continues to be able to have fun. As an example, some WoD super-mage who is constructed around the driving goal of casting a spell that will wipe out all the vampires in the city. They'll still have the other mages, werewolves, sorcerers, strippers, etc. to play with but the concept of a character being made to kill off a substantial portion of the game should have gotten nipped-in-the-bud during CG.

Second, it ignores that the player could just be a troll. People want to stop playing with me? That's just too damn bad. I'll figure out how to pretzel the rules so they can't escape from me. What? I'm going to feel bad that I'm chasing them out of scenes? That's the whole idea for a troll.

To paraphrase someone (and I don't really know who) a grid should be as large as it needs to be and no larger.

I actually find the size of the grid for Fallcoast comfortable. I wish there were things that were done to help establish some physical scale (how big a is the A02 grid, just roughly? Because if it's a single city block then yes, the city is damn small. If it's roughly 16-20 city blocks then you're probably looking at a reasonable sized city) but that's sort of a side issue. Yes, the grid squares got a little cramped with all the businesses leading off of them but already the occurrences of accidentally running into other characters on the grid wasn't very high. Spreading out to an even larger grid would have made than happen even less.

It won't be ready until tomorrow but corned beef cooked sous vide at 145 degrees for 48 hours.

Out of curiosity has the irony of this argument ever been pointed out? Some people want to maintain that through social manipulation even deeply held beliefs can be altered while being intractable in their rather trivial belief about implementing such a thing in game.

@Thenomain said in Good TV:

You mean Star Trek: The Next Geriatrics? I’m honestly disappointed at all the returning characters, and will wonder how they deal with Data after, you know, what happened.

They downloaded a copy of his positronic matrix into B-4, the android body that was recovered earlier in the very same movie.

Remember, always back up your Data.

@thenomain said in Dark Ages Vampire -- Terra Mariana:

Yeah, even mentioning it makes it come off as antagonistic.
I was going to say "fuck you" about it, but decided that it might come off as caring anymore.

Well, even if you don't care I'm going to apologize. The statement was meant to be a lighthearted jab and to illustrate something I thought was a little amusing. It wasn't meant to make you look stupid or anything (we all make gaffs like that from time to time).

@Coin said in Good or New Movies Review:

Eventually, Disney will get tired of this shit and just buy Sony, like they did 21st Century Fox. This strikes me as two very large companies calling each other's bluff; except one company is only large in comparison to any company except the one they're facing. Sony wants to believe it has weight and can move at the same financial level as Disney, but it can't.

Total revenue for Disney last year was about $59.4 Billion.

Total revenue for Sony last year was about $78.1 Billion (remember, Sony Pictures is only one part of Sony).

Disney isn't going to force Sony to do anything they don't want to do (and that includes selling the IP that Sony owns).