Best posts made by Thenomain

@faraday said in How to Change MUing:

@Rook For me, any new game has to answer the simple question: What do the PCs do.

This was asked by Indie RPG designers in 2005. Originally posited by Jered Sorenson (an Indie RPG darling), these are:

1. What is your game about?
2. How does your game do this?
3. How does your game encourage / reward this?

This doesn't help us very much, and The Forge(†) expanded on this to "The Power 19". Well, 19 questions are a lot, so I'm going to only link to them here, but the first three are important to this thread:

1. What is your game about?
2. What do the characters do?
3. What do the players (including the GM if there is one) do?

As a forum, we've touched on these before. Hell, if WORA was still searchable you'll find people like me and @Misadventure posting this list. We've been championing these questions for a very, very long time. 2005, people. Two. Thousand. Five.

(I'm sure you have too, @faraday, but you are a quiet mouse next to Mis and I.)

--

(†) "The Forge" was a forum kind of like Soapbox, but for indie RPG development and discussion, and to be honest kind of more snobby than we've ever been. The Post-Forge era of indie RPG design is what we're living in now, where we escape from Ron Edwards' rules-heavy ideologies, but we have learned a lot from it.

@apos said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:

What MUs do best as a format is something that is hard to describe to a roleplayers in other formats.

I will nonetheless try:

Real-Time Play By Post

I have used this description to great effect to people who don’t know what a Mu is.

—

Otherwise, in response to this thread in general, “It’s not really a Mush lol” is not helpful. Lord British did not think of that when he made Ultima Online. He said, “I want a Mud, but graphical.”

When Colossal Caverns and Adventure came out, the thought wasn’t to create a new medium, but to make Zork, just online.

Think about what can be done. Getting caught up in the semantics is...well, many of us are nerds and programmers and can’t help it, but relentless focus on it holds us back.

—

Edit: And another thing, this “telnet is antiquated” talk should stop. People use SSH daily. Obscuring it is not a bad idea, but throwing out a common protocol just because it’s old is shooting yourself in the foot.

Throw it out because you want to do something that it can’t do.

My Github grows and I guess I wanted a place to say: This is here, please use it, I think it's pretty awesome.

None of this is what I would consider the absolute must have code of a Mux: Bboard, Mushcron, Anomaly Jobs, @Whence, and Events. If you're not using these five systems, you should.

I have a place for most of my stuff. These systems are small and most of them are not copy/paste and call it done, tho I do get there eventually.

And now, on with the crowing.

@Admiral said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

@Thenomain I've been in situations where you are forced to use that sort of system. You compare it to raising a hand in class, but that is to avoid a large group of people all shouting 'LEMME GO PEE!'

In small social environments such as a tabletop, if you aren't comfortable enough speaking up to say 'Hey, this is bothering me' then the group hasn't done a very good job of making you feel welcome/safe enough to speak up.

And is it not plausible that suggesting tools to aid in this welcome/safe sense is reasonable enough to mention? You say that the system "gets around it", while I wholeheartedly disagree: It's another tool that people use to communicate. We don't consider crutches bad when someone's leg is broken, yet we use the term "a crutch" as if all people can stand equally on their own. This isn't true, and is a flaw in our language when we relate a tool to an attitude.

Not that you said it directly, but to follow your interest in solving an issue you personally had before you personally get burned by it again, I personally believe that how someone uses a tool starts with a shape of the tool, a personal belief understood by thousands of industrial designers, coders, writers, and artists.

I will follow this up with my personal belief that drawing lines of fault to a system that hasn't been attempted is a flawed argument. I'm sorry that you got hurt by people being too worried in the past, but people have been hurt because their own flaws needed help to overcome. A kind of crutch, we might say. A tool that is usually used to help people learn how to walk when they have problems doing so.

It's for them, not you, and until someone starts forcing it on you then I really wouldn't worry about it.

Whether or not you understand this after this moment is no longer something I care to help you with. Best of luck in your future gaming endeavors.

(follow-up: Re-reading this, I apologize for my part in Soapbox's latest spate of people basically not giving a shit what other people are trying to say, and only saying what they want to hear. I know some of this wasn't your intent, Admiral, but whether or not you get it means that you don't need it, and you're far from the first person in this thread to quasi-imply, quasi-be-inferred that these people are doing something wrong. It would be great if all of us could be as mouthy as me, or bold as you, or as comfortable as Faraday, or or or, but it's not, and after what happened in the White Wolf Vampire beta adventure basically having WW's loudest douchebag saying 'lol you guys can't handle hints of pedophilia also it's not pedophilia you're wrong lol you hate me but this wasn't me lol', I'm honestly pretty glad that Onyx Path has the balls to say, up front, This Is Going To Get Bad, these might help.)

@RnMissionRun

Or Rhost for all those same reasons.

Request

I'm not the biggest fan of Anomaly Jobs, but I'm just going to have to be in the minority until I can come up with a suitable replacement. Some games use it so heavily that adding to it might feel like a trip down to the local doctor's for your weekly leeching.

These games have come up with a way to sort out player or even other staffer requests, put them in the right bucket, assign them to the right +jgroup, and let the staff figure out what to do with them next.

The Jobs Request System is essentially a complete rewrite of The Reach's +req, in such a way that it should be trivial to add to.

Drop it into Muxify and viola.

@bored

Then I'm going to fail as greatly as possible on my own terms and try to take as many people with me into the land of Pretendy Fun-Time Games.

@skew

That's unfair. If Penn changed the original SGP -- written for TinyMUSH and migrated straight to TinyMUX -- you can't blame the foundation for it.

Maybe because I'm used to using the ChimeMUX fork, that I thought aJobs was part of the base.

TinyMUX has problems, but "SGP isn't consistent" is not one of them. You might as well blame it for having a different columns() than Rhost.

(edit: link to Chime's frankly amazing fork.)

Code Object Data Parent

Most of my code objects end up being filled with attributes. I mean, filled. Here's an idea if what I mean:

Thenomain types -=> think attrcnt( #209 )
64

Sixty-four attributes to do what? This is Wiki News and Help <wnh>, and all it does is looks at a database and pulls a file. The nWoD 2 data dictionary has 595 attributes for Core and Demon. I mean it. I like using attributes.

What I don't like is losing track of what's where. Here's an old, old trick that has been used quite a lot:

@desc object=lattr( %! )

Well that's good, but what about sorting them so that all the &cmd attributes are together? Okay, what if you use &cmd and &c? How about sorting them with headers? Why not do this, or that, ot this other, or, or, or ...

:::::::::::::::::::::::::.  WoD Health System <whs>  .::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Desc is null for this code object.

..:  Data  :....................................................................
d.data-dictionary          d.health-types             d.stat-funcs              
..:  Commands  :................................................................
c.hurt                                   c.heal                                 
..:  Functions  :...............................................................
f.conv-type                f.do-some-dmg              f.healhurt-workhorse      
f.min-dmg                  f.do-some-dmg.push         f.healhurt-errorcheck     
f.reverse-max-health       f.do-some-dmg.wrap                                   
..:  Displays  :................................................................
display.health-bar                       display.health-detail                  
display.health-descr                     display.current-health-descr           
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::.  17 attributes  .::

This is the result of the Code Object Data Parent. Muxify. Copy. Paste. @parent. Done.

If I had a "must have for Mux" code, then this is it, an informational blob to help people get up to speed on the code around them. It's not fit for everything; don't use it on a gigantic code system like Anomaly Jobs, but for pretty much every other project I find it almost indispensable.

@bored

As tools, sure.

As solutions, no.

@skew

TinyMUX is dead.

But I’m still actively developing for it.

So the question becomes: Could you live in an ancient ruin if there’s a society there?

@Lain

You may be running into an interesting community conceit: That we RP for immersion. Tabletops, as we know, RP for many reasons but mostly for sitting around playing a game.

I'd like to hear how your friends would do in a LARP or other situation where personal actions are more to the fore, and not 'I lie <clatter of dice> and win!'

@RnMissionRun said in AnomJobs - Trouble With Installation:

If you're an experienced coder and don't mind doing a bit of extra work porting stuff, consider going with Rhost instead.[...]
For anything else, I recommend PennMUSH, simply because this is the platform with the most available code,

If it can run on Penn, it can run on Rhost (mostly sure), and I would bet you a dollar that anyone running an Rhost game is willing to share their code.

Same can be said for Mux and Penn, but code availability should not stop you from running Rhost. Ashen will almost always write in a feature or a switch because you ask for it, and often within minutes.

I am pretty sure that Rhost is by far the most inclusive, the biggest amalgam of other Mushlikes in one codebase.

@Derp

And if you're running large data sets? Hooboy!

@Lain said in Eliminating social stats:

@bored said in Eliminating social stats:

You still are not adding anything, and you will not add anything. You can continue to write great treatises on this subject, but your content has 100% been covered before. We've been grappling with this for decades, and it's been the same conversation almost every time. You're by all means encouraged to argue for arguing's sake to convince people who have entrenched their positions over said decades, just be aware that's all you're doing.

If I'm not adding anything, then neither are you, or anybody else for that matter. Which raises the question of, why are you getting so butthurt at me in particular?

Not just you. He got pretty butthurt at me too, but he has the added benefit of being able to accuse you of being a newbie and therefore ignorant, either to your benefit yet insulting the discussion ("you don't know better") or to attack you ("you came in here thinking you can change things").

At this point I think it's just safer to ignore his polemic against the discussion of alternative solutions, which is his true goal. This isn't too uncommon here. Welcome to Soapbox.

Digital Ocean. I have directions for TinyMUX around here somewhere. If you want Rhost it's similar-to-identical and @Ashen-Shugar is also insanely helpful, as well as anyone on the Rhost Support Mush.

Evennia's setup is also stupid easy. That's the end of its stupid-easy, but hey, options!

For codebase: This depends 100% on your coder. I'm going to suggest Rhost over TinyMUX, but all of my code is TinyMUX so if you're starting there you're kind of stuck.

Ares if you're using FS3 and love the Portal/Scene concept. There's a lot there to love, but be sure it's the system you want beforehand.

Evennia if you're starting from 100% scratch and want to build a skyscraper taller than anything we've ever seen.

I would absolutely love to see a mail system that takes 2-3 days to get the message to the other party. I would love to code the phone/text system so that you would occasionally not notice that you'd gotten a message for hours. Or force people to report what the time is that they made the call or text, and the person at the other end be asked what time it is there to see if they receive it at that moment.

However, this shit is annoying as fuck. If you want to expand @mail, then by all means pick up BrandyMail (and only BrandyMail) and make it annoying as fuck. You know, that kind of annoying that will have me turn it off when I make a character there, because I find that kind of thing annoying as fuck.

We also used to do commands like this:

call bob on phone
speak into the phone, "Hello."
tip the messenger 3p
open door north
set language to french
say "Hello."

We moved away from this because it's not immersive; it's distracting. About 15 years ago we tested the system to see how we can cut through the code and get to the RP.

--

My rant is done. Of course dip whatever random-@emit-generator you want into the code as fits the mood and desire. A lot of my code allows hooks for it and should be easy to expand, especially the Dumb Phone Code. But when you get to the point where people are forced to register how their voice sounds so that you only get 'a deep and husky voice says...', or the cheerful and repetitive messenger @emit is bugging you in the middle of combat on top of a volcano, you'll know what I mean.

I am interested to see how large you can make this bonfire.

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

My hatred for +vote burns eternal.

You should start a thread asking people's opinions about getting rid of +vote.

Because, you know, this thread has gone so well.