Best posts made by Thenomain

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

@Thenomain

People like you and I can do some amazingly complex things in Mushcode, but it takes a level of effort that oustrips Mushcode's standard use case.

This is a very important point. For all the "bridging power" of mushcode, how many can actually use it to the level of, you know, creating a new game from scratch?

Please Note: Your concept of "a game" and my concept of "a game" seem to be very different. I don't care how much code is installed. I do this because I like to in my not-at-all-humble way "do it right", but if it's done wrong, or crappy, or haphazzardly, the only important question to me is: Are people logging in and enjoying themselves?

As @WTFE noted, each barrier between concept to login is important. The barriers are not only those of code, but of concept, of education, of engagement. I'm asking "Is it easier to learn?" I'm coming up with "no".

Or to put it another way: We are looking at solving very different problems. Every project must know what they're trying to solve. This is why I'm also okay if Evennia doesn't care if you need a deeper *NIX system knowledge to run. If it does want to educate, then Mushes do it better.

(Note that I'm not talking about plugging in a pre-made system here. That is obviously a great boon of the mushcode ecosystem but has less to do with its inherent "bridging power" and more to do with a backlog of decades of people using it for a very specific set of game styles. For Evennia (or Ares) to catch up with that aspect comes down to adoption and time.)

I've answered this already: It was very, very quick for TinyMUSH to start catching on and people writing tutorials and improving the learning curve. I've also put out there that Evennia could easily do this as well, suggested people, and said it was likely.

But right now...

• You can't do the old trick of testing your code in development in that bizarre but delightful way Mushes allow you to localize code. If you make a change, it's to the server. (New tactic: Lock the code until it's tested.)

This is what version control is for, but no, it doesn't work in the same way as mushcode.

I'm now increasing the number of disparate systems one must have a light understanding to build an Evennia game from three to four, though maybe I should take one of those out and reduce it back to three. I am not counting on either Evennia nor Mushes the ability to log into a shell and run a few lines of code. Mush remains at: One.

@faraday said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

first-gen MUSH servers

I would call Mush a "second-gen MUD server". In the same way that COBOL is a third-gen programming language, and Python is a fourth.

Actually, here, let me suggest this:

1. Pre-MUD (Adventure, etc.)
2. MUD (bare server framework for creating the game, no in-game creation tools)
3. Evennia, etc. (strong server framework, in-game limited to building, maybe a light in-game interpreter)
4. MUSH (strong server framework, full in-game scripting & interpreter)

I don't want to say that a 4th Gen MU* is better than a 3rd Gen MU*, any more than any ol' 4th Gen programming language (http://lolcode.org/), just that they serve different purposes.

And that's what I see in this discussion. "Well you can do THIS," says server advocate A. "But you can't do THAT," says other server advocate B. "But THAT is different than THIS," says server advocate A. "But THIS is different than THAT," says other server advocate B.

Evennia is different than TinyMUX. We know this. Look up. No, more up. Look at the first post. Look at the question posed:

@Hexagon said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

What is your favorite code base and what makes it special?

You seem to be taking it as an attack on Evennia, @Griach, at the very least defending the differences between Mushlikes and Evennia, differences that do not need defended. Explained, maybe, but you've explained them already. If other people don't think those differences are valuable, why do you care? If you do care, why don't you change them?

But me? I'm explaining my opinion and observation to anyone who wants to know them. That's 100% of my intention. What people do with them from there is up to them.

RPGs are games, right? It's right there in the name, right?

I'm just going to leave this here, then:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/warhammer-rpg-books

Castle Falkenstein tried using cards, mainly for more of a LARP feel at the table, and enough people asked for dice mechanics that they came up with them.

Cards are fun to play with, fun to explore and look at, but on a text game they lose a lot of that. I coded a pretty decent visually stimulating text interface for FreeMarket RPG, which doesn't use a typical deck of cards but feels more like what would happen if you asked a board game creator to create a system for an RPG, and the nice thing about board games is that they almost never rely on a rules-master; the rules have to work on their own.

Or LARP systems. Why don't we use more of those? We are, effectively, a computer-aided LARP.

I personally think that a light-touch MUD system is good for the hobby, something where we realize that the entire game lives on a computer so why not let the computer do all the work. Push that "computer-aided" part further, and let the LARP part happen as it will.

I would also like to see how Mouse Guard RPG would work online, because while it's far more traditional, it hits lighter and easier notes, far more tabletop LARP than what we normally try.

@Griatch

No apologies needed. When I see a discussion that seems to become all restatements of earlier comments, I do try to challenge them since usually I'm the one at fault. By challenge, I mean "is this going anywhere?"

I also saw Some Other People starting to react a little more confrontationally. Nothing horrifying or poisonous, but as I was explaining to @faraday earlier in private chat, "this is no longer an important goal" can be very easily interpreted by someone who takes it personally as "this use case is useless", or something less antagonistic but still challenging. For instance, you're getting push-back that in-game developers are dead, when I see a fairly constant rate of, mm, about two a year? This isn't bad. One advanced coder can help less advanced coders maintain I'd say about four games. Less advanced coders can do a lot.

If you can't tell, I want systems that are educational and easy to setup and maintain the server setup in order to help increase these numbers.

I don't think we're so off-topic that it's not useful. I think talking about the pros and cons and design goals fits very well into the original question. (Also: Tangents? On Soapbox? You don't say!)

It's all good.

@jaded

Worth it just for Rebuild.

Meanest but funniest thing that the DM did to us:

AD&D 2nd Ed. No, that's not the mean part, shush.

We were playing a ... morally ambivalent group and at some point of clearing out a different group of morally ambivalent people for money, we ran across a girdle that was marked "girdle of giant strength", so my character put it on. Of course it was cursed, but it was a 50/50 thing; it only happened to be a girdle of gender change.

My character played up the "oh no now I'm a woman how horrible my life is now" because, well, c'mon we were role-playing being jerks with a common goal of making money. This wasn't the mean part.

Later on we heard tell of an island where demons were keeping a Lawful Good sword (probably a Holy Avenger) and we thought: You know, we would piss off so many Paladins if we went and grabbed this sword and sat on it. It was so obviously a Paladin trap, else a bunch of demons wouldn't be this obvious about it.

So we went and battled demons and demons and survived the craggy and slightly volcanic island. At the end we found the sword and freed it from its difficult imprisonment. Whatever AD&D called an angel appeared and said, 'Oh thank god, you freed me with it! Whatever you want is yours!' My character, of course, asked to be switched back to male.

Now here's the cruel and funny bit.

1. The angel was another demon. He didn't undo the curse, he just cast "Polymorph Other" and since my character agreed there was no save. The next minute he got affected by a Dispel Magic or a magic-dead zone, it wore off.

2. The angel was another demon. The sword was not a Holy Avenger but cursed to high heavens lowest hells. It gave some pretty nice bonuses but the user was at a decent risk to go berzerk. So we kept it.

What we didn't know was the sword was also intelligent and took over the free will of the fighter who was using it. We didn't much care until it started trying to kill us.

So we dropped it into a Bag of Devouring.

Much, much later, when we had all forgotten about it, it came back from the Astral Plane to get revenge.

So much fun.

--

My thief kept the Bag of Devouring because hell, why give up a perfectly awesome cursed item? It sure helped us get rid of an otherwise impossible to destroy intelligent cursed sword.

@surreality said in Turn Off Gifs?:

Because shaming is a super classy way to get your way, right?

Your mom is super classy!

(... yeah, I'm still working on it.)

@auspice said in Cheap or Free Games!:

Spec Ops: the Line free on Humble

Now here's a game that I wouldn't mind the endless grind. I played some other cheap-as-free FPS military game similar to Ghost Recon and I didn't even finish a fourth of it because every. Damn. Mission. Was the same.

But I've heard so much good about The Line that...yeah, plus one million for the heads up.

Alright, let’s keep this productive, and help poor X-Men Utopia out by removing this from their thread.

The core question: Should character information live on the wiki only?

I say a staunch no. In situations like a scene or when I’m new to a group of people, it is tedious to have to look each one of them on a wiki, even using a client that can recognize a URI and create a link out of it, most of the time it doesn’t work, this assuming the player has taken the time to enter the correct information.

There are ways to mitigate these issues, but none of them are as easy as typing +finger bob.

Emma,

I'm pretty sure Jaded started Wora as his playground of trolling PHB staffers on WoD games. Everything else was an accident.

History!

@auspice said in Cheap or Free Games!:

Shadowrun Returns Deluxe

Worth it even not free.

I am so happy that Hare-Brained is doing well.

@Arkandel said:

The God-Machine is the Storyteller.

So weak. Much lame. Wow.

I do not understand why people get up in arms about pop/soda/Coke. Except that "Coke" is a proper noun and should not be used as a collective noun.

Now excuse me, my allergies are making me sneeze my head off. Hand me some kleenex while I google a remedy.

+1 @faraday .

I'm not saying she's not influential, I'm saying that I personally believe that we could do better. Much better. I believe that Anita is doing a good job at attracting attention, but that we need other people to continue the conversation after the conversation matures.

I personally know Phase 2 Feminists ("You've come a long way, Baby") and seriously believe that Anita is regressing the cause. Sure, sometimes we need to take a few steps back to take a new path forward, but we need to move forward as the second phase of that.

@thatguythere said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

@thenomain said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

So just copy the text and paste it into your web browser. It isn't that har—

That is what I do once the scene gives me a reason to care, though I will freely admit that does not always happen.

I was referencing earlier in this thread where a few people were against and a bunch of people were ambivalent at best when they have to leave the game window for some basic information.

"A cute brunette with cherub cheeks", for instance, is one million times more useful to me than "Felicity Jones in a uniform".

(edit, because I got ninja'd by Faraday): I consider at least a shortdesc like that to be critical.

I mean, yes, I should know who Felicity Jones is and be all fawning over her quirky Zooey Deschanel look, but I still had to look her up. Really, I had to look up every actress mentioned in this thread. "Cute brunette with cherub cheeks"? I could know more, but now I know a lot.

Tell me what you want me to know. That's what a desc is. But just like a pose, at least give me something.

--

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

Another reason I think descs have fallen out of favor is that the entire system is so dang clunky. You have to put in the static desc, create a bunch of outfits

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Nobody ever made anyone else use a multidescer. A lot of people have tried, mind, back in the late 90s and early 00s, but I have been resolute even as a coder that if they wanted to they could knock themselves out, otherwise I'mma gonna do my static thing.

@rinel

Are you using the board that sets up the scenarios for you automatically? Because that one is A-MAZING.

@EmmahSue , @Cobaltasaurus , EmmaDad and I will be embarking on our first trial combat this Tuesday. (Note: EmmaDad has played Gloomhaven before. He's interested and we'll benefit from someone who knows the rules.)

@faraday said in Character Information: Wiki or Mu*?:

But different people have different opinions about what constitutes "essential".

And as a game creator, you often have to look beyond your own preferences in order to create a better experience for your players. What I think is a foundation, not the whole of the design.

DID YOU KNOW: Tabletop games are awesome? Well mostly awesome. But some of the most awesome have been turned into computer interfaces.

Humble Store is having a sale on them. A lot of them. A metric fuckton.

Here's the link. Hell even Tabletop Simulator is worth the price of admission if you play even one game for less than the $80 they go for in print.

And if you buy a game, you throw a few pennies to the voiceless Moiren, because it's often good to support one of our own, right?

@faraday

Well, is it a review, or a viewpoint? "Hey, this happened." Then we talk about the thing. I'm sure this has a name. I think it's called a discussion?

Which is all well and good until someone takes it personally, or responds to it personally, or someone throws a knife then someone else throws a missile. The law of disproportionate response, because emotions are not in check.

@ganymede said in Regarding administration on MSB:

I think you could make a 1-star Yelp review that didn't immediately devolve into Hog Pit territory.

And we have.

But who devolves it into Hog Pit territory? And what is the law when it does?

@misadventure said in The Witcher Pen and Paper RPG:

Looks more like CP2020 than Fuzion.

That's Interlok, by the way.

Yes I'm a R.Tal fan.