You can also get the free GMC Rules Update, which is an extension to nWoD's core rules.

@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessibility' - ideas?:

I'd be interested in what kind of features you would be looking for in order to have an easier time getting into Evennia

Getting the system started and into the part of the system where coding happens—which can happen in multiple places—is a distinct challenge for me. While people have told me what Django is a few times, I don't remember why I need it so talking about it can be distracting. While I use git/Github to store my code, I don't use it to code.

While TinyMUX can be a pain to get compiled right, once it's compiled there's a single button to press to start the game, log in, and get confused by the next layer of "build the game".

Ares comes close to this.

Evennia's documentation is good, but...here, look, here's a part from the first documentation page:

• The Getting Started page helps installing and starting Evennia for the first time.
• The Admin Docs covers running and maintaining an Evennia server.
• The Builder Docs helps for starting to build a game world using Evennia.
• The Developer Central describes how Evennia works and is used by coders.
• The Tutorials & Examples contains help pages on a step-by-step or tutorial format.
• The API documentation is created from the latest source code.

Okay, so I assume I look at "The Getting Started page". Yup, there's how to install and get running. I'm on a Mac so sure, let me look there:

cd mygame
evennia migrate  # (this creates the database)
evennia start    # (make sure to create a superuser when asked. Email is optional.)

Except that I know there's another step that I'm missing because it runs in ... virtualeng? veng? vengence? Something.

Okay, let's try the Administration page. Ahha! "Starting, stopping, reloading and resetting Evennia." Here it is!

A common reason for not seeing the evennia command is to forget to (re)start the virtual environment (in a folder called pyenv if you followed the Getting Started page). You need to do this every time you start a new terminal/console and should see (pyenv) at the beginning of the line. The virtualenv allows to install all Python dependencies without needing root or disturbing the global packages in the repo (which are often older).

source pyenv/bin/activate (Linux/Unix)
pyenv/Scripts/activate` (Windows)

... What?

Wait, do you want me to run this every time I log into the shell? I know almost nothing about pyenv. This is a step up from a true newbie who will know literally nothing about it.

My solution? I like how MediaWiki does it. There's a full "we know you're a newbie let's try to help" page and then there are a number of "this is what's going on behind the scenes with this particular aspect" pages. This is how I drill down to the various setup security levels and new namespaces. It was absolutely confusing at first but because I could go up a level I never felt entirely without hope.

Incidentally, "Startup scripts for remote servers" points to the same file which does not have any startup scripts for remote servers.

--

In updating:

When you're wanting to apply updates, simply cd to your cloned evennia root directory and type:

Do I need to be in pyenv?

When the database schema changes, you just go to your game folder and run:

Do I need to be in pyenv?

(Extra credit: Does git pull tell me when my database schema changes?)

--

Alright, let's look at the beginning developer docs!

Explore Evennia interactively

When new to Evennia it can be hard to find things or figure out what is available. Evennia offers a special interactive python shell that allows you to experiment and try out things. It's recommended to use ipython for this since the vanilla python prompt is very limited. Here are some simple commands to get started:

# [open a new console/terminal]
# [activate your evennia virtualenv in this console/terminal]
pip install ipython # [only needed the first time]
cd mygame
evennia shell

Wait, do I need to enter pyenv here?

--

I think this is enough for now. I know I sound like I'm complaining. I am not. I am horrible at pointing things out gently, so I do it the way I do it while I get better at doing it.

If I had a better grasp of how people learn I could add examples of why the documentation is confusing, but for now I'll explain why it's confusing for me.

I sincerely hope that helps.

@bobgoblin said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

To note, The Expanse did start off as a table top game. Likelihood of getting approval: High.

I put nothing to chance in a world with Steve Jackson in it.

DOOBLE POOST:

@saosmash said in The OOC Masquerade ?:

I find that when information is widely available there is a concomitant social pressure to minimally familiarize myself with it or Not Know What is Going On.

I find that people love to read logs, explore wikis, and immerse themselves in the culture.

I also find that if people are familiar with each other—or want to be—to joke about things on people's wikis on OOC chat, they are acknowledging that it's Table Talk, that it's OOC, and that supports a culture of keeping it considerate. Saying, "WE are the players, these are our characters. They aren't the same thing."

This is one dino's WoD focus, but I've watched the shift, and seen other cultures (specifically AetherMUX) be confused that "OOC Masq" was ever a needed thing.

When people here say it's up to culture, it really is. And staff's approach informs that culture. Which includes code implementation.

Ta.

Alright, clearly I need to keep assuming that nerds will nitpick at every damn thing said. Thanks to @Surreality who took a more holistic approach to what I said, and was the only one to get it right.

Not that you two uber-nerds aren't technically correct, but when is "people will tell staff all the time" going to move the conversation forward.

Did I mention in another thread wanting to set this hobby on fire? This is not a small part of why. Double points to @mietze for both being technically correct and pointing out a known issue, though.

I mean, it's not like staff ever picks on players for things that aren't posted. That staff goes off on players without seeking clarification first.

And that's a huge problem about defining the limits of IC/OOC Responsibility. Game culture comes from the top, and if the top is dealing with things that distract them from running the game then how can we expect them to even want to engage with the game?

But they must engage with the game. Even psuedo-staff like faction heads must engage with the game, even if they acting on a purely OOC administrative standpoint.

All people on a game, whether or not it's staff or players or administrators or storytellers, have a responsibility to the game as designed and directed by the head staffers. (Theno's Hill to Die On #2. #1 is, by the way, the right to Fade to Black.)

I can't think of a popular themed game I've ever tried that didn't have a PHB involved, someone who is insane, but it works because they are insane about the game. The passion goes beyond the reasonable, but it's acceptable because their passion carries through to the game, even if they are also trolls or engage in cronyism.

Anyhow.

Everyone has a responsibility to the game. If they seem to be filling those responsibilities within a reasonable expectation of their position, everything is good. If not, then that's when the responsibility delegates up until it reaches headstaff. And if headstaff can't at least try to be responsible, then I don't see how they can ask anyone else to be.

Tangent: I think Mushes I’ve seen have become a more like sandbox video games: Less about the story and more about the experience.

When I started, the stories we told could get confrontational, but they were things that people wanted to do with their character.

Doing things with the character on these games has become so pointless. Jobs-based events. Fewer people in public. Less engaged staff. You might laugh on a public forum that Caine just rode up to a seedy bar on a motorcycle in the middle of Albuquerque, but Caine rode up to a seedy bar on a motorcycle in the middle of Albuquerque.

I never thought this would be something I would use as an example of better than what a lot of games are doing now, but I would kill for this level of involvement again.

@tributary

Just TS like them.

Hey @Mr-Johnson, a friendly note:

You seem to be doing okay with the input, but it's okay to think that Game Design by Soapbox is one of the worst ways to do it. Take everything said with a grain of salt or two. Or ten. Hell, have a whole salt-lick.

@deadempire

Options can be a bad thing if they distract from the gameplay or give an advantage that some might consider unfair, both things others have offered some concern over. This is normal. I wouldn’t want new rules to change my character or force me into unwelcome gameplay either.

However, I don’t see anything unfair so far and I’d be surprised if anyone was notably inconvenienced, tho it’s hard to comment on an incomplete system. I doubt it will end up game breaking, but if so then I expect to hear reviews about it here.

@mr-johnson

Absolutely, but make the game you want to play and you will enjoy running it.

You people as a group are nicer than any community theatre I’ve ever been involved in.

Thank you for that.

@ganymede said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:

@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:

(That's a trick question. The answer is never. I have never been excited about anyone's WoD chargen.)

Even your own? That's some real self-loathing shit right there.

I like my own chargen just fine, but not the hoops that everyone but @Cobaltasaurus has made people go through to get approved. I've also been recently told that my chargen is "confusing". My gut reaction to that is people are "idiots", and that if the Reach-style chargen that has been going around lately is what people prefer, then I would ask them to tell me where on the doll Mushing has touched them.

Really it's mostly that I have problems coming up with a concept that part of my mind instantly sabotages because I've become jaded through too many years in this hobby.

I'm not interested in one more moment of making a character for you, staff. I want to make a character for me, and that means finding out what this character is about during play.

I have skipped to the very end because I didn't see people focusing on this:

In almost every other rolled situation, you have a fairly clear idea of risk/reward, even if sometimes the risk is you don't get the reward. And by "reward" here I mean "find the trail" or "hit the dude". Sometimes the risk is more interesting.

I've seen very few social systems lay out a risk/reward system in as clear a matter. It's muddy and far more personal than other systems. Negotiating seems to be required just to get started. There are almost never rules as to what social stats can do, and that makes comparisons to combat and other types of contests neigh useless.

So start with deciding what your social challenges are for.

Then make a system that does that.

After that, it's a matter of tweaking the first or second step until you feel that people are engaged.

IMO: If a room is not dug, I may forget that it exists or never know at all. I still use in-game resources to discover locations and get a sense of the setting. If the character can go there any time, then it's persistent. If it's not, then it's not.

Or put another way: An existing room shares the same amount of reality to everyone, while one from a log or a list of locations that may be created on the fly does not.

It's Ten Forward vs. The Holodeck.

I think that a huge part of this problem is that almost every RPG we play has a resolution system, while social interactions are a process. The closest process we have in RPGs is combat.

The resolution system, even if it’s done over time, is “roll these dice, try to get that result”.

The Fantasy Flight RPGs with their bizarro dice do a lot to mesh dice with more flexible results. The Smallville RPG was mainly about how the actions influenced and were influenced by the social relationships. The Dr. Who RPG, tho not being pvp, puts social results as resolving first and combat results resolving last.

But in the end, I think the problem with the RPGs we’ve been playing is that the game doesn’t tell us what these social systems do, or they don’t fit the persistent PvP mediums we use.

The systems I’ve seen for social in WoD are like Ganymede mentioned. Have you shown anyone else your Vampire regions system, @Sunnyj? It’s just...right. It’s Reign (the RPG) for vampires.

And we should give law enforcement teeth, or give violence systems that are not death teeth. Give Status teeth (Eldritch tried). Make taking something away from the character a possibility,

I’d like to start with carrying broadswords in public, because legal or no you’d probably be on first name basis to several cops.

@faraday said in Respecs.:

It's kind of like when people on a historical game ask for historical accuracy. There has to be a balance. Too much and everybody's dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail.

Ob XKCD:

@ganymede said in Make it fun for Me!:

Many people in this community need to grow the fuck up, then.
My experience differ vastly from yours. The people I run with are generally okay with winning, losing, collaborating, competing, and being good to others. Jealousy is a non-issue. Feelings are shared often and openly, with no fear of reprisal.

I want to bring up the other half of this statement, which you and I have seen so many times that we hardly think about it anymore:

There's no issue when you accept the person you're playing with.

Where people need to grow the fuck up is in accepting that fun of others is just as important as their own. If everybody was reasonable about this, drama would take a nosedive like you on your SO.

Man, I take it all back. How you present yourself doesn't matter anymore; it's only if someone objects to it that turns a discussion into shit-talk.

I'm starting to understand what old people mean by "kids these days"....

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

As far as affecting the setting, I’ve never needed tools for that, just permission from staff.

This is a sandbox. Make your own fun and leave staff alone.

...What?

If you're complaining that WoD games end up being social MU*s with RPG elements, give them other elements

I don't think you know what I was complaining about, no. I can with absolute authority say that "do something different" is easy to say but hard to assure, especially if players are going to default to the same ol' same ol'. I've seen many games use that default as the basis for their systems, which makes sense to me, but saying, doing, and succeeding are three widely different things.

Or not, keep making sandboxes that fail to engage.

... What? Darkwater: Engaging. Fate's Harvest: Engaging. Some people find Reno engaging. So I'm wondering what conversation you think I'm having, but I don't think it's the same conversation that you're having.

I could simply not understand the conversation you're having, but as of now I don't find it engaging and so I'm disengaging.

So things have changed. Things have changed a lot. The "Zero to Mush (with wiki)" is still good, but it's changed and gotten messy with exceptions.

So here's my instructions, partially for myself, on how to set up ChimeMUX (what I call the experimental Chime fork of TinyMUX) on Digital Ocean.

This is not a static post, but I will try to update the thread with what changes have been made.

---

Get the right Digital Ocean account

For this tutorial, it's going to be the LAMP account.
https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/lamp/

Start with the $5/mo account.

---

Make a Game Account

In my extremely strong opinion, you should not use 'root' for the game. There are a few reasons for this, but the main is that: It's root.

(The secondary is that an account for the game makes it easier to manage.)

Log in to your account as root then do this thing:

sudo adduser <username>
sudo adduser <username> sudo

Then log out of root and log into your user. Do as much as you can from the user.

I'm aware that creating an account with super-user abilities is not a whole lot better than using root, but it's cleaner and easier to see what's going on. The rest of this tutorial is going to assume you've done this.

---

Get ChimeMUX

There's a few steps here because while LAMP has almost everything you need, there are a few packages that won't be there.

sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc make bison libpcre3-dev libmysqlclient-dev

(bison is for Omega, which while isn't compiled by default, it can be an important tool for doing some deeper Mux things.)

I believe the game should have its own account. For this type sudo adduser <username> sudo and then re-log in with that account.

Either way, at this point you just need to follow the directions from Chime's GitHub and you'll be fine: https://github.com/lashtear/tinymux

Mostly fine. You need to open the port in the firewall:

sudo ufw allow <game port>

If the game hasn't been started yet, do so now. Log in. You're done.

Important Tidbit: The initial login for #1 is:

connect wizard potrzebie

---

Configure MySQL

You're going to have to engage MySQL without a password. As Surreality says below, the default install has no password for root. That's fine, because you can do this:

sudo mysql

Now you'll need to make a database for the game, and an account for the Mux to log into that database. From within MySQL:

CREATE DATABASE <gamename>_db;
CREATE USER '<acct_name>'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<password>';
GRANT INDEX, CREATE, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, ALTER, TRIGGER, LOCK TABLES 
    ON <gamename>_db.* 
    TO '<acct_name>'@'localhost';

You can, of course, change this however you want.

Check that you did well:

SHOW GRANTS FOR '<acct_name>'@'localhost';

Type exit to get out of MySQL.

---

Link TinyMUX to MySQL

cd ~/game
pico etc/netmux.conf

Somewhere near the bottom, or even at the bottom:

## database ##############################
sql_server localhost
sql_database <gamename>_db
sql_user <acct_name>
sql_password <password>

If your game is running, @restart it if not, bin/mux-start it.

Log into the game.

Type the following:

think sql( select 1 )

If everything went well, you'll get a response of '1'. Congrats! You have SQL!

---

Set Up MediaWiki

A lot of the system is already set up. Digital Ocean does have a "how to set up MediaWiki" page but it's out of date. Right now, here's what you need to do to seal the deal:

sudo apt-get install php-intl
sudo apt-get install php-gd
sudo apt-get install php-xml
sudo apt-get install php-mbstring
sudo service apache2 restart

curl -O  http://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.31/mediawiki-1.31.1.tar.gz
tar xvzf mediawiki-1.31.1.tar.gz
sudo mv mediawiki-1.31.1/* /var/www/html

It's really too bad that there's no easy link to 'most recent stable', but hey. By the time you read this, there will probably be a newer version.

Now check your web site for the "LocalSettings.php not found." message and click on that link below it: "Set up your wiki."

Here are the things to change from default:

Database name: <gamename>_db
Database table prefix: wiki_
Database username: <acct_name>
Database password: <password>

The "name of the wiki" and "administrator account" is up to you.

I also suggest turning on "Account Authentication" & "File Uploads". I forgot to record what other good ideas are in there. (Such as 'Cite' and 'Poem'.)

Now the hard part: The wiki setup will give you the LocalSettings.php file. Upload that to /var/www/html/ and, once it's in there, the following critical steps:

cd /var/www/html/
sudo chmod o-r LocalSettings.php
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .

Your Wiki is now set.

<I hope. Further instructions to follow.>