Best posts made by Thenomain

@faraday

Because people who believe themselves to be reasonable, steadfast, and intelligent are still manipulated because of their ego, fear, and ignorance.

@mietze said in Status: City of Fog and Blood?:

I think that could be fun. Though reboots are pretty tricky.

Unless the game has wound down to nothingness, then you wipe character objects, twist the key a few times, and say, "Hey, come see this new game."

What would a superhero game need to do to bring in more people or a bigger base, a second answer:

Give the players something to do.

That's about it.

@tek said in Arx- Gareth:

Man, I have no horse in this race, but based on his posts, I wouldn't want this dude on my game either.

I feel the same about the phrase "free you from the game". What a load of political bullshit. If you're going to throw someone off the game, don't say you're giving them anything, lest of all "the opportunity to play elsewhere". This is probably because I lived through the 80s. Hey Management, please don't say you're doing me any favors. Sheesh.

Okay, rant done. I understand that when it's your game you get to behave however you want, but I don't think anyone's smelling like roses, here.

edit to add: Nor do I think anyone is being a one hundred percent absolute shit-stain colostomy bag. I'm seeing honest misunderstanding, poor communication, political wrangling, and finger-pointing. You know, people being people.

@ThatGuyThere

Yet consider your favorite tabletop scenes. Did you pose? No, you say "I throw the spear." / "But it's made of iron! You can barely lift it already!" / "I want to throw it anyway." / "Sigh, fine, but you're at minus three steps to even hit." / (rolls, hits) / (everyone bursts out laughing.)

We have no "Mushlike" way to enable this, and no matter what you do, the pose will be removed from the action. I would be happy if combat scenes had no posing and allowed table-talk, aka OOC, for the interaction.

Since you're on a roll, @mietze:

Corollary: If staff finds they want to or are telling a player to "shut up" in those exact words, or their blood pressure is rising, take a breath and step back to either let yourself settle down or to let someone else step in. Tagging-out is not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of wisdom and ultimately in this hobby taking care of your players is a strength.

Everything that @mietze said is true for staffers as well as players. I say this to assure balance, in no small part because we've all been there, feeling like staff is not playing by their own rules. If staff doesn't play by their own rules, if staff does not act the way they are willing to let other people act, the rules, guidelines, or desires of the staff are diminished.

People take the cues on how to behave on a game from staff first and foremost. I've watched many staff, not just players, be told that they need to let the game go, or staff tell other staff to back off (aka "shut up"), and the fights that followed were no less disastrous nor dramariffic than when a player does it; perhaps even more.

(Pulling this over from an advertising thread that is, really, about classic Changeling. As you can see in a moment, this isn't.)

@Wizz said:

@Thenomain said:

I like playing nChangeling because it offers a low-power campaign type that I miss, where what you are messes up what you want to do. Vampires are Vampires. Werewolves are Werewolves, Mages are Mages. These are their job descriptions.

Just as an aside, this is definitely true of oMage/Vamp/Werewolf, but nWerewolf-- to me, when it's played well-- definitely dials back on "I am noble monster, I fight evil" and is more "regular dude/dudette who has some bizarre part-time obligations, struggles to find a normal place in society against new and unfamiliar instincts" as well.

Really, they all have exactly as much depth as you give them.

That is interesting (honestly interesting, as the kind that makes me want to respond), considering that in another thread someone (@Coin) said that in nWerewolf, you were either doing the things that Renown demands or you aren't playing Werewolf.

I think that's more true than what you state. You can play someone who is Joe Blow, Sudden Werewolf. You can even play in a troupe with the same goal, just like you can play a Changeling chronicle about storming the gates of Arcadia, but I don't see these games being about this. It's an option, not the thrust.

This is one of the things that makes World of Darkness simultaneously popular and pointless. You can reasonably argue that you can "do anything", and "anything" includes things outside the key word in the title up there: Things that are dark, and foreboding. The corner bar and movie nights are not dark unless they are exceptions that prove the rule. And they're not.

D&D (any of them) is about being Adventurers. You're forced into it. Your character is assumed to seek out trouble, else are you playing D&D? Are you? I don't think so. In Traveller, you're assumed to be explorers; a suggestion that is in the title. Fading Suns: You're going to play politics and religion.

World of Darkness, the core game without playing creatures, still has you playing a role, but instead of telling you what the role is, like the games above, it tells you what the setting is. As long as you are engaging in that setting, you're playing World of Darkness.

Then the supernatural game-lines pop in and we merge that idea back into the first games. You're not a werewolf, you're a werewolf of a particular philosophical bent with a particular role, even if your character didn't get to pick it. You as a player did pick it. You now have a character with a philosophy and a role in a setting.

If you want to say—and it is legitimate to say—"I'm not going to engage with the philosophy/role/setting", then I don't think it's unreasonable to say, "Then you're not playing the character/game." Even if it's Joe Blow who didn't want to be a Rahu, if you're not playing "Joe Blow who didn't want to be a Rahu", then you're not playing Werewolf.

This is my take on it, however.

Boudica: Wondering where you went. Only had a few scenes, but they were intelligent and downright fun. Hope things are going well. Etc.

@Kestrel

As said by others, that pose skims a line. If you retract the internal monologue in that particular case, I would expect it to be fine by most people. There would probably be other ways to set the tone without using character brainwaves.

I rely on offering internal monologues in my poses, and I rarely hear a complaint.

@Cupcake said in Darinelle's Playlist:

And you love it.

You know that he's incapable of love, right?

@Arkandel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain Places code also has some disadvantages. For example (IIRC, I can't check at the moment) every pose has to start with your name.

This discussion has moved here: http://musoapbox.net/topic/1062/better-places-code/

In short, the 'pipe' can be used for emits. I believe this has always been true for classic Places, but like Anomaly Jobs, documentation and culture surrounding the use of this older code can be anything from mildly frustrating to utter WTF.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

You paged H with 'I'd ask around later if there are any lone Grounders interested in RPing at the village, for a smaller scene.'
H pages: Yeah, I will, probably. That actually really turns me off, honestly. One of the reasons I don't care for MUSHes as much.

I you guys too, really I do, and I hope you won't take me posting this as a 'fuck you, I'm so mad that you didn't let us join'. But can you see how the environment fostered by this particular etiquette standard might come across as very nerve-wracking and unwelcoming?

Can you please frame the example situation as it would happen on a MUD? That is, you asked someone if you could come to their house, they said nope sorry too busy, and that's off-putting to you. What is your cultural expectation?

@Ghost said in Kardis?:

Crisis

... And I'm all outta Bubblegum.

Place Pose Thoughts:

"" Say
:: Pose
;; The other kind of pose
|| Emit
<double backtic> OOC

Your finger's there anyway. Tap it twice.

This last one could look like: ``:grumbles.

Yeah, I'd probably screw this up all the time too, but I'd like to give it a go.

@Coin said in The Apology Thread:

I am sorry for trolling my friends whenever I have staff powers by setting their @aconnect to /quit.

Shame on you.

Now when I log in I'll see this "Huh?" and not know why.

Next time, try QUIT.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Also - if you need a doctor and one isn't around, you can absolutely go to the hospital and NPC doctors are coded to give you the gift of healing - but you're at the mercy of the person that wounded you actually getting you there on time, and no amount of OOCly paging/calling/seeking someone to save you via OOC means is going to help - you've got to navigate through the streets to the hospital and hope you don't bleed out along the way. (You have 1 rl hour).

Why 1 hour? This seems like an arbitrary number to me, and you were arguing against abitrariness for creating hard feelings. Even set rules can cause hard feelings. "I had only 2 points over lethal, while Bob had 10, and he had the same hour to get help as I did, that's unfair!"

And this is what gets me about Muds: All these systems are, in the end, arbitrary. Like all games, you pick the game you like and you play it, knowing that it's arbitrary. Saying "at least Muds do it differently" is the concession that different games are different. It's not a solution, and the way your particular Mud habit goes isn't better in general. It's better for you, absolutely, but I don't see this as being a solution to any problem than "one of a thousand ways to do it".

So no, I don't think your answer is a great solution. I think it's a concession to the people who like things that way, as opposed to people who like things, well, the Mush way.

Plus One Million to @Ghost for starting this thread derail.

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

Also - if you need a doctor and one isn't around, you can absolutely go to the hospital and NPC doctors are coded to give you the gift of healing - but you're at the mercy of the person that wounded you actually getting you there on time, and no amount of OOCly paging/calling/seeking someone to save you via OOC means is going to help - you've got to navigate through the streets to the hospital and hope you don't bleed out along the way. (You have 1 rl hour).

Why 1 hour? This seems like an arbitrary number to me, and you were arguing against abitrariness for creating hard feelings. Even set rules can cause hard feelings. "I had only 2 points over lethal, while Bob had 10, and he had the same hour to get help as I did, that's unfair!"

And this is what gets me about Muds: All these systems are, in the end, arbitrary. Like all games, you pick the game you like and you play it, knowing that it's arbitrary. Saying "at least Muds do it differently" is the concession that different games are different. It's not a solution, and the way your particular Mud habit goes isn't better in general. It's better for you, absolutely, but I don't see this as being a solution to any problem than "one of a thousand ways to do it".

So no, I don't think your answer is a great solution. I think it's a concession to the people who like things that way, as opposed to people who like things, well, the Mush way.

2 points over...10 points over... whether your arm is severed at the elbow or shoulder - you're bleeding.

You are reframing the argument until you're right. And you would be right that, in a system where those two instances are being compared, then they probably have about the same time to live. But what about losing your hand vs. off at the shoulder? What if I knew just enough to make a tourniquet? The system doesn't care. The system isn't coded for it. Yet I bet the person with lots of pressure on the wrist-stump has a lot more time to live than the person with the shoulder-stump. If the system can't apply basic first-aid knowledge to it, can't I also call it unfair?

It certainly is equally (un-)fair to everyone, but man is that not going to matter to some people.

As @Lothorio says, and as I said, knowing the system is one of the reasons to play or not play a game. I'm not saying that your system is wrong, I'm saying that it's no better than an RPG-based game. It's just different. Therefore, it isn't a solution.

So DigitalOcean removed the MediaWiki one-click droplet.

(Great, now what?)

• Create the Server

1. Use the LAMP droplet.
2. Log in as root. Change the password. Run:
   mysql_secure_installation
apt-get update
3. From this page, the following seems to install all the gcc/c++/etc. tools we'll need:
   apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev gettext unzip
4. Create a new user for the game's account and escalate their privs.
   Use these directions from DigitalOcean.
   (Skip the SSH key stuff for it. See below.)

• Log Into the Game Account

1. Create a public SSH key for it (mostly optional, do it anyway):
   ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "user@email.com"
2. Get you some PCRE (critical for Chime's install at least):
   sudo apt-get install libpcre3 libpcre3-dev

• Get Us Some MediaWiki
(Follow along with the instructions on DigialOcean's site.)

1. [Step 1] The apt-get instructions are out of date. Run the following:
   sudo apt-get install php-intl
sudo apt-get install php-gd
sudo apt-get install php-mbstring
   (If you want to install texlive later, remember to run the apache2 restart line.)
2. [Step 2] Do not use the curl in their example as, it will not work. Instead:
   a. Go here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download
   b. Right-click on the download to the latest release and select 'copy link'.
   c. In the terminal window: curl -O <paste the link>
   d. Continue with the 'tar' and 'mv' instructions.
   e. You might want to 'rm' the installation leftovers from your game account's directory.
3. [Step 3] I'm using the game's account_name for both the database and user.
4. [Step 4] You will absolutely want a wiki prefix. 'wiki_', for example. If you do anything else with your database, such as news/help integration or xp or a sensible stat system, you will want their table to have their own prefixes. (This is against good database design, but with the Mushlikes it's non-trivial to get around that.)

You're now ready to go back to the start of this thread and continue after making a new user.

I'm sorry that DigitalOcean took out a lot of the brain-dead-easy parts of this setup.

I hope that this helps.

Notifications:

• 09/12/17: The base TinyMUX install is not finding mysql.h. The Chime fork compiles fine. Looking for solution.
• 09/18/17: My bad. See two posts down.

@SkinnyThicket

I can't tell you how many times people have pitched to me to make a template room system, something a level above temprooms (my favorite code contribution to this hobby). If people use it enough, allow it to become a permanent addition to the grid. Allow people to tweak the description. Remember the bar settings that were set the first time someone put a bar there, for the consistency. A++. Would Assimilate This Code.

@surreality said in Setup ChimeMUX + MediaWiki on Digital Ocean:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions - preinstalled (enabling string functions is also useful)

Yeah, ParserFunctions is now one of the things you can install by default.

And String Functions isn't useful, it's goddamn mandatory. This is the one I was hoping to be reminded about.

"DPL3" being the other one.

Thanks.