Posts made by The Sands

Ok. I think I get where the miscommunication is occurring. I'm not talking about literally building a grid that represents a space station but then dividing it with gates that can only be passed through at certain times. What I'm saying is that the Pandora gates, as written in the source material, would sort of function in that way (if they are not being employed as plot devices). In this case the grid isn't a station, it's the Mars (or wherever) side of the gate and the alien world side of the gate, but you functionally end up with much the same effect. Player A wants to play with Character B but Character B is on the 'wrong' side of the gate.

Implementation 1 would be that they are plot devices and characters do not just waltz back and forth through them. This makes the situation above far less likely to occur and probably closest mirrors the source material. However it does hamper those people who are interested in a Gatecrashing style of game.

Implementation 2 is that the Pandora gate room is just a nexus room that leads to multiple off world areas and that people can just freely go wherever they want. One of the problems with this is that you run the risk of losing the feel of Gatecrashing. What was a bold and dangerous activity that requires effort and careful preparation suddenly seems a lot less special when the team runs into a couple of Lesbian Asian Schoolgirls who came out on a picnic.

So pluses and minuses on both sides. I'm just wondering what type of implementation you think would be best (or if you had a third option).

(Regretfully I've done this for far too long to think 'just ask players to be responsible' is a viable option. It's less a distrust of all players in general and more that it empowers a tiny number of bad actors to do a lot of damage as well as the fact that it is just vague and you will get too much argument between well meaning people as to what 'be responsible' means).

@lithium I'm sorry. I guess I'm just being dense. That didn't really answer my question.

@jennkryst At present I can't really see putting that much effort into a spaceship portion of the game. It might be interesting at first but in the long run it would probably become tedious and people would lose interest, especially if you implement it in any fashion that mimics spaceship travel in EP (people generally prefer to egocast between the different planets because space travel is relatively slow. Spacetravel largely occurs in those instances where raw materials need to be physically moved and for little else).

Don't get me wrong. I love space travel. I've got spreadsheets to help me get really good estimates on how long it should take to travel from one place to another with a given setup (percentage of ship dedicated to remass, specific impulse of the engines, etc.). One of my 'toy' character concepts (i.e. a concept that I've made that I find amusing but I would probably never play) is an emergent AI that was exposed to the WM virus while it was sleeved in a biomorph and which is now sleeved into a nautiloid with a brainbox (making it a psychic artificially intelligent spaceship).

I just think it's a lot of work for very little payoff and is about as necessary for an EP game as a 'car driving minigame' is for a WoD game.

@lithium Are you talking about gates as a plot device (there's going to be a mission through the Pandora gate to planet X on Saturday) or are you talking about the gates as simply something connecting different parts of the grid (similar to an airport in our earlier hypothetical grid that connects the New York and London sections)? In the first case I absolutely agree that access to a Pandora gate is good. They provide a constant stream of new locations that staff can open for a period and which players can essentially go nuts with limited consequence since the temporary location isn't a permanent feature. If it's the second case then the negatives are that I think it will be divisive (either because people are stuck on the wrong side of the gate at different times or because people treat travel through them differently).

@lithium In theory that sounds like a good idea. The boats in Everquest were built around the idea that they would foster interplayer RP while people were sitting around and waiting for them. In practice people largely hated the wait and that was for something that came by every 30 minutes, not something that opened a few times per week.

The real problem (as I see it) with the gates is that it is really easy for a player to wind up with friends on both sides of the gate. Logging in and not being able to RP with the group of friends who are connected because you're on the wrong side of the gate seems frustrating (especially if the other group isn't connected at that time).

Now you might chose to handwave waiting for the gates to open and have people bounce back and forth freely but essentially what you are doing is building a game with one portion of the grid set as New York and another portion set as London. Some people will probably feel that it hurts their experience when someone else bops back and forth casually between the two areas, especially when that person wouldn't normally have easy access to that type of travel. More casual players who want to bop back and forth will become irate at people trying to 'stifle' them.

Which isn't to say you can't have the gates and the other planets and such things being part of the game world. I think it just might be prudent to handle them through temp rooms, much as you would in a WoD game when someone goes out of town.

@lithium I thought about gates. The issue is that supposedly you're not suppose to do a whole bunch of back and forth between those gates. As you said, there are only a handful of them and they are in use by they whole system. As a result they have pretty long waiting lines and usually only open up to any given location for a few minutes each week.

Out of system gates don't have the same problem since they have a lot fewer people trying to use them. Their biggest time restriction is that they can only link to system gates during those limited windows. Linking to other out of system gates is a lot more free which is part of the reason I was toying with an established colony idea.

@Jennkryst, I was not considering any kind of 'space minigame' because I figured for the most part it would probably include all the excitement of a highway drive combined with calculus. That said, what kind of 'minigame' would you be looking at?

@mercutio I'll have to look into that. I'm inclined to go with a modified version of EP's Reputation system if I do decide to replace the standard Credit system simply because that is a system already familiar to players and it would integrate nicer but not having looked at Nova Praxis there's every possibility that when I do so I'll realize it offers some sort of significant advantage.

I should note that I'm in very early stages of spit-balling ideas for the setting. About the only thing I am relatively sure about is that it won't be 'the entire solar system' because A) that would be enormous amounts of time building the grid and B) I think it would cause massive player dilution which would especially be bad at the start of the game. Mars is simply once possibility for an initial setting. Titan also strikes me as a good possibility. A third option would be a developed Pandora gate colony (we would probably move the time frame so that the date is now A.F. 110 or something). I'm even toying with the idea of a 'non-EP setting' using the fundamentals of Eclipse Phase (so perhaps something like Altered Carbon; terrestrial based with a larger prevalence of biomorphs and only occasional synthmorphs). A large reason for this thread is to sort of take the temperature of the room and see what people might be interested in.

@ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:

Look, I like Joss Whedon. I like his tongue-in-cheek-but-formulaic groundwork for the MCU

He has become a bit formulaic, but it is a formula he pretty much created. I won't say he was the very first writer/director to play around with things like trope inversion (such as pushing a badguy into an engine intake just after they have concluded the monologue that for a more normal director would have identified said badguy as a character you're going to be seeing all season long as they hunt our intrepid heroes) but he did it with a style and panache that was undeniable, all while providing logical reasons for the trope inversion (seriously, why on Earth would the heroes of other shows NOT get rid of the badguy after he's basically said he will never rest until he murders them?) as opposed to doing it purely to surprise people when it would make no sense (e.g. inverting Batman's trope by having him quip when Wonderwoman shows up).

@mr-johnson It's always been a little amusing to me that when Steve Rogers was first thawed out and was 'a man out of time' it was only 20 years after World War II ended.

The Good Place is awesome. It is amazing that someone in TV Land was allowed to create a show that ended the way the first season ended and then run as the second season ran. It is so 'unsafe' compared to most other shows, but that is exactly part of what makes it so great. It isn't Big Bang Theory where 10 seasons later the big change is that Sheldon lives across the hall from the apartment he started in.

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.

You might want to try looking at Mocker. It is a barebones TinyMux, mySQL server, and mediawiki running under Docker containers. It should get you up are running in a couple of minutes (although I'm sure it will have its own hiccups. I've already discovered that it probably won't automatically get the databases setup correctly on the mySQL server due to race conditions and recognize that you need to go in and change some passwords for security).

@selu said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

The Stone Age game set in the Cradle of Humanity would be pretty lit and easy to play. You are a Black person who lives in a tribe and are enjoying yourself until these strange human-shaped Killer Vampires appear.

That's all well and good until someone wants to app a character who is a technological genius that runs around with bronze weapons.

@faraday (Raw) Data itself is not really subjective. The biggest danger you have is that it simply won't have something you later realize you needed to capture. This is why I'm a fan of the broader capture form of character, location, and idle duration (and I should note that I'm also making some assumptions such as that you will be able to reverse engineer certain other points such as the player the character belongs to and the sphere the character is in. If that's not going to be the case I would probably capture those bits as well).

The truth of the matter is that if you are storing the data in any kind of real database (i.e. not inside a game object or something) the data storage is pretty cheap. For a game that polls data every 6 minutes I should be able to take Timestamp, Character DBREF#, Location DBREF#, Idle, and Sphere of each person online and it will take about 1 MB per person (so if you have 50 people connected on average about 50 MB) a year to store that data. You'll pick up a little more memory if you do things like create a table so you can connect names to the Character and Location DBREF#s, but not much at all.

Now the interpretation of that data certainly can be subjective. Are your parameters really showing you something reasonably approximating RP? That gets a lot harder to say. Even worse, it could be argued that even if you get the magic formula that shows you exactly how much RP is occuring that may not ultimately be the best way to determine the 'health' of the game. Do people just hanging about the OOC rooms chatting or talking on channels count for anything?

@thenomain Ultimately a system is going to have to do some guessing unless it is overly obtrusive, but you can probably make a pretty good guess.

What I would do is code a system that checks every 5 minutes or so and figures a person is 'engaged in RP' if they are in an IC room, have been idle for less than 15 minutes, and there's at least 1 other character in the room who has also been idle for less than 15 minutes. If all those conditions are met it considers the person to have engaged in 5 minutes of RP (and since the check occurs to everyone it would consider the other character to have also engaged in 5 minutes of RP).

Since everyone's mileage varies you might want to turn up or down the length of time someone's been idle (or even make the length based on the number of people in the room since people will usually idle a bit longer in big scenes as they wait their turn in the pose order) before it is counted as 'RP'. If you are have connection to an external database such as one on a mySQL server I might not even do that. I might just record each entry at 5 minutes as character, location, and idle duration. Then I can tailor and adjust my queries on the raw data until I think I'm seeing pretty accurate results.

I've written a couple of these types of loggers before and found them to actually be pretty useful. With a little cross-referencing of data you can see what the active days of the week are, hours of the day are, what locations show lots of activity, and how active one sphere is relative to another.

@thatguythere said in Good TV:

@aria
A transhumanist sci fi RPG that was free on the games website for a while, but I think the ended when the new edition came out. The setting and stuff were neat but I never played it so can't comment on the systems except to say the seems on the complex side of things from a read through.

I'm not sure how high a complexity I would give it. At its core it is pretty simple. You have a stat, such as Kinetic Weapons (which in this context means guns that shoot bullets). You roll a percentile die roll and you want to roll under your skill to succeed. The difference between your roll and your skill is your Margin of Success or your Margin of Failure and there are additional effects that can kick in because a Margin is either 30 points or 60 points (think of it as normal results, results with a mild adjustment, and results with a major adjustment)

Like most games these days the designers decided to throw in some wrinkles. If your skill is being opposed by another person's skill (for instance, when you shoot at someone they get half of their Fray skill to oppose you shooting at them) they roll their skill as well. If one person fails and the other succeeds it is really easy to figure out the results but when both people succeed the person who rolled higher succeeds (not the person with a higher MoS but literally the person with the higher die roll). This seems counter intuitive since if you roll low and succeed you get a better result but it is also easier for your opponent to prevent the result since it is easier to roll higher. In practice it seems to work out fairly well.

A second wrinkle exists in that characters have a few points that regenerate every so often that they can use to modify their rolls by doing things like reversing the two dice (so your roll of 61 becomes 16).

Combat actions can be modified by doing things like aiming, dodging, firing a single shot, firing autofire, etc. but it doesn't strike me as much worse than most games that include modern firearms.

A little complexity is added because your character is essentially separated into two components; the Ego (which really is your character) and your Morph (or body, which can be viewed as a piece of equipment since this is a transhumanist game). If you move from one Morph to another the different bodies will have different modifiers which means your Skills may adjust. Also some types of Morphs have different abilities (eg: artificial robot bodies don't need to breath or feel pain, biological bodies can use psychic abilities).

From there, yeah, you can dive down the rabbit hole into what skills a character needs to create blueprints to use with a nanofabricator or what is involved with hacking into someone's cyberbrain, but really those things are no more complicated than the rules for a Changeling PC to build Tokens in your average WoD game.

Sure, it isn't the simplest system I've seen but it is far from the most complex. In all honesty I think the bigger issue a non-initiated group might have is that the setting is just so freaking huge. You've got the inner planets which are highly capitalistic and which are probably relatively easy for new people to understand, then you've got the outer systems where they are living in a 'post-scarcity economy' and so money doesn't mean anything and everything is based on your reputation. Earth is a desolate wasteland and is suppose to be off limits to all humanity (though some adventures might have the characters deal with the biomechanical horrors that cover it or occasionally crop up in other locations) and the Pandora gates lead to planets in completely different solar systems. It is really easy for a GM to provide no guidance to as group and then when you sit down you find that one person is playing a Lunar Oligarch, a second is playing an anti-transhumanist from the Jovian Junta (think sort of space fundamentalists who live on Jupiter's moons), a third is an AI program who grew up in a virtual environment and the last is a University Professor from Titan who specializes in Old Earth relics, none of which are appropriate for the adventure that the GM had which was recovering a derelict Scum barge that is out around Neptune's orbit.

@faraday It turns out not to be too terribly difficult, at least at the level I'm working at right now. There's certainly more advanced Docker stuff that will probably result in images that are more secure and which do things 'properly' but for now what I'm doing seems to work.

What I did was I created a Docker instance for Ubuntu (I actually tried some more minimal setups at first but went back to Ubuntu because of some of the tools I wanted). Once you spin that up you can log into it using a command similar to docker exec -i -t mocker_game_1 /bin/bash (mocker_game_1 is the name of the Docker instance I'm running and /bin/bash gives me a shell inside of it).

From there I basically figured out all the steps that I would have to run to setup a new tinyMux server (downloading build tools, configuring, compiling, etc.). You then create a Dockerfile (not to be confused with docker-compose.yml) that repeats those instructions. You run a new command along the lines of docker build -ttinymux:2.10-U ~/Docker/mocker/release/ which tells Docker to build a new image called tinymux:2.10-U using the Dockerfile found in ~/Docker/mocker/release/.

That's sort of the 'elevator pitch' version of it, anyway. It does get a little tricky since the commands in the file can't pause for input and you need to work in stuff so that when you run things for the very first time data gets moved around so it is accessible from outside docker (for persistence and so you can back it up) but if you're already capable of compiling a game on a new machine you can probably handle those extra issues.

Like I said, I will provide more complete details about everything I was doing so that you can build your own Arcker (or whatever you'd like to call it) image. I just want to wait a day or two in case someone says 'oh, Holy Hell, the way you've done this will lead to the eventual extinction of life on Earth. Don't do it that way' or something similar before I write out the more detailed account. This is just to show you that it is probably not hard at all (having never spun up a copy of Ares I don't want to absolutely promise it will be easy since there might be some gotcha I don't know about) for you to build your own image.

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.