Posts made by TheBigD

@Ghost I hope it's good. Mel Brook's humor is such that I think a lot of his old stuff couldn't be made today.

@Hella Thanks very much. It's good to have a listing, even if it is not as extensive.

So since mudstats is dead, or at best, an empty zombie... is there another site that comes close to providing the same sort of information about all text based games?

@Hella My condolences. May he rest in peace.

@buttercup In my mind, at least at the time, I don't think there's anything to apologize for. To me, anyways. I admit I giggled at the dog's name. I thought it was a joke. One in extremely poor taste, but still a joke.

I do admit to still being baffled by Shangrila. A lot of weird, not nice shit went down there. I only logged due to a friend's insistence, and when they got bored and left, I never logged there again.

@tinuviel May your road be sunny and straight.

@buttercup THAT was you? xD

@arkandel I'm of mixed thoughts on this.

On the one hand, if it's just min-maxed stats? That alone won't win fights if said stats mean +2 extra damage over everyone else, or maybe a few more of the bad guys fail their saves on that fireball.

On the other hand, if it's full out min-maxed everything? Eeesh. I'm watching my current GM struggle to contain the character of his son, who has definitely picked a very good class for min-maxing. He can do ridiculous damage, to the point of one-shotting anything we've faced for the most part. My buddy-GM has had to pull out all the tricks just to slow his son's character down. xD There's a broad line between "I do a little more damage." and "Nothing lives if I can get close enough to hit it." The GM knew the risks, but it's his son. We've not been robbed of our fun, such is our GM's ability. But if his son was a jerk, or he was inexperienced GM? Yeah, that'd be a whole lot of not fun.

When I GM, I allow folks to min-max stats. But I really encourage character flaws too, everyone needs an achille's heel. Mooks are for killing, as they say, but you can be darned sure that if the BigBad gets a whiff of you, they're going to be studying your character from afar. They may find out that they need to stab you in the girlfriend, or long lost twin or something, to bring you down without having you get close enough to one-shot them.

@runescryer said in Player Omsbudsman?:

So. An idea that I've been tossing around the recesses of my mind for a while now is the concept of an ombudsman position on a game. Basically Staff/Royalty whose sole function is to be an advocate for the players of the game. Someone who is not regular Staff that players can bring concerns to without fear of having said concerns either handwaved away or met with claims of the player being uncooperative, hostile, misrepresenting the facts, or any of the multiple ways Staff can sabotage their own games. This isn't a concept for complete lost cause games, but more for those games that honestly try to do things right, but might have bad instincts when it comes to Staffing and some control freaks are given power they really shouldn't have.

Thoughts?

Most, if not all, of your staffers should have the player's interests at heart, and player interests should generally align with the staffers. If not, then it won't matter if you have a staffer with the soul purpose of advocating for the players. If the staffers won't take the player's considerations seriously, then why would they take that particular staffer seriously? And if players don't believe that they are being treated properly, they won't put their trust in that staffer.

@smile Brains suck that way. hug

@mietze Have fun!

@de-villefort said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@thebigd

The problem with most RPG settings and coffee shop chatter is that in most games you are keeping secrets. You are secretly the vampire slayer, you are secretly a witch, you are secretly a werewolf or an agent of the technocracy.

Most, but not all, games have a premise which require that you never talk about the thing that consumes most of your adult life with any strangers. On games where everyone is keeping secrets small talk has to be kept to the smallest, most boring stuff possible to protect the hidden truth.

Uhm. No, I disagree. There may be some characters that cannot keep their mouths shut, who might engage in as little small talk as possible. But if we go with your premise, big secrets being kept, you're secretly a "insert super secret identity here"... then you are masquerading as something else. I would bet you a good lunch that many of these characters are probably trying to fit into society to a degree. So yeah... people are gregarious. Most of us talk. Even if a little. Clark Kent engages in small talk all the time. He may have revealed his identity to a few people, but I don't recall it being in the coffee shop between the order line and the pick up one. "How about those Flames? Also, I'm Superman..."

@greenflashlight said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

I dunno. For something no one wants to RP, I'm surprised how many scenes seem to be strangers making awkward chit-chat in line at the coffee shop or whatever.

The point there might be introducing characters to each other? I dunno. Or two players who have no inspiration or thoughts towards something meaningful to RP? xD

@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

Of course there are everyday heroes, but as a medic iRL I can assure you that most responses would be pretty dull to RP. A single season of a show like Chicago Fire is basically everything exciting that happened in every fire department across the US in the span of a year. I think it would be hard to sustain a MU like that. (But if somebody wanted to do it - more power to them.)

Right but the same thing can be said for all RP. No one is going to want to RP out the boring, every day bits unless there's a point. Every RPG is like real life in this aspect. Your characters still need to pee, eat, sleep, breath, and lots of other things we basically put out of mind because they're not worth remembering/thinking about.

My point was that even on a "boring" day for lots of real life people, someone in that scenario is looking at a hero.

@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

I think you may have a narrower definition of "RPG World" that some of us. I think what you're maybe getting at is that RPGs are often focused on heroic (or anti-heroic) people running around having adventures for months or years on end. That doesn't exactly happen every day in the real world.

Yes, yes it does. The medic performing CPR on you may just be having a regular work day, but to you, that person is your knight in shining armor. It's all about perspective.

@grayson And at least one of those people queuing up is intending to shank you.

@山口-二矢 Bwahaha, that was my first introduction to text based games, a mud named Redemption. Enter a room, woops, enemy players, text spam for the next five minutes.

I played a character whose class was conjurer. I could summon mobs from all across the mud. At one point, pretty much as many mobs as I had mana. My character could also clone herself, and equip things. So no way to tell the difference between my character and her clone.

I recall being able to break clan halls, but the text spam was unbelievable. To the point of people's dialup connections not being able to handle it. Not only could you not know what the hell was going on, people would get disconnected. It was gloriously hilarious.

They eventually put a limit on the spell. Something that should have been in place from the beginning, but it was a wiz's favourite class so...

Muds were all about twitch reflex and skill. Twitch to spam spells/skills, skill for knowing which of those to spam, when to switch up tactics or when to run.

Good times in the good old days.

@silverfox I, too, use MukLuk on my phone, and DuckClient on my Chromebook. Both are fairly basic, as you say.

For my laptop and desktop, I use BeipMU. All the bells and whistles you can shake a stick at, and really nice to use when it's fully decked out.

@pyrephox Try https://www.horrormu.com The http version doesn't exist, and the https version may have a security certificate your browser/IT might not like.

@reason Well, I'm no coder, but I've been breaking things in games since 2000, if you want alpha/beta players?