Best posts made by Thenomain

Blood! Blood in the middle of the sea, almost a mile wide, with not a single sign of life for days! I seen it with me own eyes!

@faraday

I posted a response that got eaten by bad connection, unless it's going to appear while I'm typing this.

CF's magic system was based on the lay line, which worked in cycles, so it was thematic that you would not see a color/value combination until the deck was reshuffled.

There are board games where you won't see the card ever again, as well, mostly used as a way to either create tension in the decision-making process or so that you can bury the card and prevent another player from having it. The former is more interesting than the latter in most RPGs, but may also have an effect in a creative GM-less PvP system which almost all board and card games really are.

Otherwise I agree. A deck of cards as a dice system doesn't seem that interesting to me, though Fate Core sells one. Where it might be interesting is if the card is mixed with another effect, as mentioned above and/or a different thread, pressing that "limited decision" button. And...Fate Core sells one.

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It doesn't help that card-/deck-management code for Mu* is ugly and cumbersome.

(edit): It's not that you can't create a system that does the work for you and outputs, say: Either +3 or Carry Forward.

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That reminds me: @Lithium, have you ever looked into Apocalypse World or any of the many, many Powered by the Apocalypse games?

The main problem with them is they are designed for a small group at a table. I don't know how they'd scale, but I'd love to find out.

@Jennkryst said in Searching for Star Wars RPI:

I feel chargen would be super easy if you don't code in all the prerequisites... just let the players fill everything in manually, and then staff combs it for accuracy after. It's not shadowrun or rifts, here.

This is a 100% valid way to do it. This is how we did it in WoD, and some people still do. There is nothing wrong with it, the question is always where to put the bulk of the work. On players? On staff? On code?

In my [incoherent mumbling] years of coding chargens, I can follow a fairly steady path of that. Game opens, players join, staff discovers that they have to either focus on players or on administration, staff asks code to take work off their plate.

This is the way it should go, IMO. But then I see this happening:

Staff takes on extra responsibilities via house rules, mini-games, and character actions; staff discovers that they have to either focus on players or on administration; staff asks code to take work off their plate. Repeat.

I can't blame anyone for doing this. People have ideas, people want their ideas to be fun and cool and add to the game. Since this is a hobby, people aren't thinking, "I'd better do some kind of analysis to see how this would affect things including my own time and the time of those around me."

I can't blame anyone for doing this.

But this is why occasionally, someone sits down and says, "You know, I know this. Let me create, from scratch, a system that will answer some of the most common problems that will come up if we get even moderately popular."

Many, many thanks and adorations to staff who are willing to deal with the problems of imperfect systems as they come up, and calm the player down when it doesn't give them precisely what was promised to them. Just as many thanks to the players who are okay with this.

@Chime said:

In particular, people that are comfortable with shells and setting up MUX games could be very useful in getting the mechanipus fork of MUX into a more end-user usable state, if people are still interested in that. If not, well; it'll keep. It's all on github, but no I won't build it for you and set everything up.

@Chime:

I would like to make a "Darkwater nWoD" bare-bones game database, complete with your quiet room that's ready to run.

Hell yes I'm interested.

So this is a thread about racism now? This is a genuine question, as I've been too busy to keep track. Sorry.

@lithium said in Alternate Game Systems:

@ominous Sounds intriguing but I don't really see /how/ to efficiently convert that to mu code much at all.

Zones or parent rooms. Both would fit the bill easily. What I don't see is how this would effect the entire world, unless you ran the deck-generation for each event/scene. I'd have to look at the system.

I am Thenomain on Skype. I will chat code pretty much any time my brain is not melting.

@arkandel said in Good TV:

@thenomain Of if you're into the utopia aspect of Star Trek then this show is definitely going to piss you off. It's way grittier than anything Trek has ever seen before.

I don't mind gritty. Deep Space Nine was at its best when it was gritty.

@lithium

It sounds like you'd have a single system which reads the settings of the world and generate it based on those settings. (Imagine how Places code works: It's all the same code, it's just using different settings.)

You have to be much more picky about its use-case, though. On a tabletop game, well, it doesn't matter if the entire world uses the same simple deck, because there are roughly 5 or so (give or take) people using it, including the GM. This is a classic example of a tabletop RPG not translating to a Mu*, because the coder is going to say something unhelpful like, "How do you want this implemented?" And then you go from playing a tabletop game to game-designing a LARP or an MMO using tabletop rules.

I'm in no way saying this shouldn't be done, but the question is still hangs there: How do you want this implemented?

Why clear it up when you guys are so awesome?

@auspice

My pen is the Uni-Ball Vision Elite .5mm and no other. It doesn't blot when my horribly small and scratchy handwriting flies across the page or stays in one place too long, and I'm more likely to lose the pen than run it out.

Elegant it is not, but like a Golden Retriever never judges nor fails me.

@bobotron said in Alternate Game Systems:

Re: PbTA
My experience with this is very limited, as I found 'narrative moves' to be... a bit odd, personally. Like, the 'narrative moves' are already things I'm doing/RPing in general. I don't disagree with you; I don't have problems with losing socially or physically or whatever. But a lot of people do.

This is one of the reasons why I think that each game should have a clear explanation of what playing the game is about. "Apocalypse World is a game about the difficulties of survival in a post-apocalyptic Earth. ThenoMUX focuses on life in the remains of Boston after the Psychic Maestrom and ensuing nuclear war (or was it the other way around?) reduced most of it to rubble. Technology is blamed, even hated, and fought over by two of the most powerful factions, while green mutated human monsters roam between old neighborhoods. What do you want? How will you survive?"

Or something.

This has nothing to do with alternate game systems, other than this late mention that in PbtA games, especially Apocalypse World, the stats/moves are little systems tied irreplaceably to theme and setting. I still like that idea. More than most system ideas.

Only if you set the '0' register somewhere in there. You don't. You probably meant (untested):

&cmd_TNroll dco=$^\+tndice ([0-9]+)d([0-9]+)\+?(-?[0-9]+)?\/?([0-9]+)?$:@remit %L=<Dice> %N rolled %1d%2[if(strlen(%3),if(gte(%3, 2),+,)%3,)] for [setr( 0, add(die(%1, %2),%3))] TN:%4 [if((gte(%q0, %4)),Success!,Failure!)]

@arkandel

Sometimes you even do it on purpose. I would love to see what Aaron Sorkin would do with sci-fi, tho after "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip", maybe he should just keep within his comfort zone.

I should lightly clarify. I don't deeply care what people think the God-Machine is as long as it isn't killing chances for RP or wildly off what the core book says (not because I'm married to any of the WoD books, but because this is the common ground for all of us).

I think it is not a philosophy, a bureaucracy, anything grounded in belief. It uses these as tools, but at its core I see the God-Machine as a machine, a thing. After that it can be a gigantic interstellar AI or a planet-sized spirit that is integrated or fused to the Command Installations. I prefer the Iteration-X/60s Technophobia view for reasons already stated: Mysteries all the way down.

I do prefer that it not be responsible for the modern monotheistic religions that feature angels and demons, but for reasons that my Atheist ass cannot immediately explain, probably having to do with free will.

@derp said in Group Notes:

@auspice

I think the +lairs code has this?

To quote the coder: lair notes (goddamnit)

Video games where you can get through it easily enough until the very final, end-game situation.

I'm looking at you, Pillars of Eternity, for making me go to "easy" for one fight, but you're far from the only one.

@surreality

Will do.

@Tempest

It would be easier to store all of this in a database and find some way to pull the data into MediaWiki (like this one.) This would mean that either system could pull the data, but crazy Surreality wants her own way. Why? Did I mention that she is crazy?

Mostly it’s so that the wiki is chargen, which is admirable but from a data storage standpoint is still cat-lady levels of crazy.

@ashen-shugar

Yes.

Who has noticed that YouTube has an increasing number of Homestar Runner episodes on the official channel?

Who has noticed new content?

If you haven't, enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom