I would much rather watch people try and see than not try at all.
Posts made by Thenomain
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RE: Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness
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RE: Status: City of Fog and Blood?
@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."
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RE: Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness
@cumush said in Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness:
Just Dayton proper or the whole Dayton metropolitan area?
Oh I don't know, I think you could double the incredibly tiny grid size it would be otherwise, so the whole area.
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RE: Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness
Dayton, Ohio. I dare you. I double dog dare you.
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RE: Interest/Volunteer Check: Major Multisphere Chronicles of Darkness
Still need to work out goddamn Arcane Beats.
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RE: Are MU* videogames
Merriam-Webster sez: an electronic game played by means of images on a video screen and often emphasizing fast action
Is a game played over Skype an "electronic game"? What makes a game "electronic"? (Dark Tower, so much fun.) As long as there's no one definition, we can be going at this all day.
The problem I have with your example, tho, is that you are not "playing Skype". Skype itself is not the game, any more than you are "playing email" when playing a game of chess with someone via email. Email is not the game, so I don't think it's right to call email "a video game".
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RE: Are MU* videogames
I would be happy calling it either, as there is a computer system you are playing against.
Want to twist up my brain? How about Hearthstone? Is it a computer game or a platform? Well obviously it's a computer game. But why? Two people are doing nothing they couldn't do with specialty cards? I think it's because the system automation. The players are still using an automated environment to do, in some cases, pretty heavy math. At times, the entire published library is at the players' disposal. The game takes the need to work any of that out of the players' hands. In games like these, it's usually impossible to act outside the rules provided to you by the computer program itself.
The same goes for fighting games. Still very clearly computer games, where two players are using the computer as the medium for the fight, but the computer is doing far, far more than providing a communications platform.
On your typical Mush, the game isn't doing a whole lot of rules computing. It's a set if insanely specialized tools to allow the players to apply their own rule, a step up from using IRC for RPGs.
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RE: Are MU* videogames
I would agree more with this friend if he didn't just contradict himself by saying MMOs are not video games. And if we are to be pedantic, saying someone who plays MMOs is not a "video gamer" while an MMO may be a "video game" then we have two entirely different completely opinion-based questions. I need to fix the plumbing on my sink; am I a plumber?
Anyway, a MUD has automated systems with clearer win/loss mechanics, while a MUSH is an extended tabletop game platform. I'd agree with that distinction that one of these is a computer game and the other is not.
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RE: Fallen World MUX!
I read it for you and I really hate Mage, Awakening at least. The Paths/Orders section saves it. Giving the big bad enemies the same treatment as everyone else made it shine for me.
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RE: Dreams to Reality
Does the menu allow me to globally turn off the cutesy "Did you mean Help?" style error messages which, okay, I've always found demeaning. That's just me, mind you. Sometimes when I forget I'm logging into an Rhost that message set set me scrambling to remember what's a flag and what's a trigger and what knife at the dinner table is best to plunge into my eyeballs so I never had to see it again.
edit: That reminds me, what I want out of my Mu* is things to be more consistent. What's a flag on one game is a toggle on another? No. None of that. No more of that. What the hell is a "toggle" anyway? Oh, it's a preference? But on some games it's a flag? Quiddit.
And no, I didn't mean "allow players to turn off annoying help messages", but "menu-driven kill it dead with a pitchfork".
edit on edit: This is why I think Penn, tho having the older chat system, has the worse of the two between Penn and Mux. It involves the kind of laissez faire approach to systems that Mushes suffer from. It may be better featured, but I don't believe it to be better presented.
final edit: Which may be the source of my "hair shirt" feeling when dealing with Penn. Again, A+++ to Javelin and Faraday and so on, but I sometimes can't shake the feeling that there is an undercurrent of professional superiority from other Penn coders based on what appears to me to be nothing more than feature set. I dunno.
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RE: Dreams to Reality
TinyMUX. It has the most I need and the player base I want to code for. I wish it had about, mm, three or so Penn/Rhost features, but that's about it.
Rhost players, Mux players, and Tiny players seem to be cut from the same cloth, but there's something about playing on Penn that rubs me the wrong way. I would follow Javalin into code nirvana, but playing on Penn is like wearing a horse-hair shirt inside-out. And the channel system. Holy crap, that channel system is worse than what we used to use for mail before @mail. (Myrddin's Firelizard Mail ring anyone's bell?)
Even stock TinyMUX is not my preferred system anymore, as @Chime has opened up hard-coded limitations and fixed the bugs that opening these limits revealed. (I would crash The Reach about once a week before she fell to my cute puppy dog eyes and fixed it.) I haven't looked into Rhost lately, but last time I tried to run a stat system as data-heavy as WoD, it looked at me like I was trying to solve world hunger in Perl.
I think I lost sight of the question. Er, yes, all of the above. USA! USA!
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RE: Shadowrun: Modern
THE EXTENDED POST:
@faraday and I had an extremely long discussion about money and government in the future, and it's changed my plans. Originally I wanted to have USA break down into essentially city-states, everything dependent upon local governments and hyperlocal communities, both relying on the supply-and-demand which are the international corporations.
However, Faraday brought up a key problem: The SIN, the identifier that allows you to get things done. With one, you're marked for life but can get a lot of things done. Without one, you can get a lot of other things done but so much more is difficult to do like "rent an apartment" or "use a bank".
This all came from one of the key feels of Shadowrun that she expressed, and is the reason I set up this thread to begin with: Without the SINless, it isn't really Shadowrun.
I'll argue about a lot of things "not being Shadowrun", but I concede to this. But that brings up so many questions: Who manages the SIN? How do people get paid? How does cash work? My head spirals out of control, so I'm going to put down ideas.
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The SIN is a GUID for individuals. It's a biometric and historical check comprising of DNA, fingerprints, loan history, criminal record, birth certificate and so on. It's everything we fear a universal ID card would be. Problem: Who controls this database? Is it global? Based on government you were born into? Is there an agreement among the corporations to share this information? Each answer changes a lot, such as "is the city-state sprawl feasible?"
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Cash in a post-cash society. If we have the SIN, why do we need cash? What bank or government in the world would risk giving up cash? If the governments were really corporations, why wouldn't they have a 100% Traceable global standard? Or worse, a 100% corporate-only script? This latter one feeds into an idea for "Corporate Enclaves", i.e. living womb to grave in service to a corporation. You work sixteen tons and what do you get?
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Digitally signed currency in a post-cash society. I think we're going in this direction. This is really where the discussion Faraday and I started with: How can you have credsticks when you don't trust anyone around you? For that, she convinced me that the future still needs cash, especially a future with criminals for hire in it. Mind you, if you're getting paid by a government or major corporation, then I'm going to assume that they can get you currency that's hidden in the system. (Thoughts on that one, @faraday? Also, others?)
A RESPONSE WHILE I WAS TYPING THE ABOVE:
@deadculture: Part of what I'm doing is seeing what Shadowrun would look like if it was designed today, right now, as I'm sitting outside a Wendy's looking at the rush hour traffic drive in front of the tri-state area's largest university (and one of the best cancer research hospitals in the country).
For example, the idea of a Southern USA Secession seems outright implausible to me, let alone the Great Ghost Dance reclaiming huge amounts of the southwestern USA, at least not with blood, a lot of blood, and I don't see the natives of this land having those kind of numbers. But that's just my explanation for saying: I don't think it would fly in today's culture.
I think hyper-localized societies makes sense. America is starting to "get" what New Yorkers have known for generations: That Europe is how it is for a reason of population and space, not because "lol Europe". Gibson's Bridge series and Miéville's Bas-Lag series both hit this hard, as well as pretty much anything written by Stephenson.
I do have a singular reason to focus on these authors as templates: I feel cyberpunk should be personal. It should be about people, at least mine will be. I find myself subconsciously focusing on how every element I'm inspecting affects people. Not just the heroes, because in my perfect cyberpunk fantasy world there are no heroes, or they are heroes in the same way that a firefighter or a civil rights champion is a hero: They're heroes to the people around them, the people whose lives they improve.
The world will be the world, but you? You're the person you want to be, if you can make enough space to be that person.
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RE: Streaming: The Long Dark
@Songtress said in Streaming: The Long Dark:
Can OBS be used to steam to Youtube?
First Google hit to literally that exact phrase: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/guide-how-to-stream-to-youtube.4333/
So, yes.
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RE: Evennia for MUSHers
I can verify that the Evennia chat room is open, friendly, and usually appropriately silly. The occasions I've seen tensions rise, others have stepped in to say, "Hey, okay, let's not go there." Even tho I've done little there but kind of trade witty repartee with @Volund.
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RE: Cheap or Free Games!
@lordbelh said in Cheap or Free Games!:
So Steam Summer Sale is going. I'm thinking of buying the Shadowrun games. Anyone played them?
I love them. The first one the least, the last one the most, but they're all good and fun even if I can't seem to defeat the final boss levels on the second two.
That said, my fellow Shadowrun enthusiast @faraday didn't care for the first one so didn't play the others.
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RE: RL Anger
@tragedyjones said in RL Anger:
Dear mister loudly-shouting, angrily-gesticulating, horn-honking guy in the car behind me: I am genuinely and sincerely sorry that you want to turn at this cycle of the light and cannot, but I am still not going to pull out into the intersection until I am certain the light won't turn red while I'm blocking it.
This is proper protocol. People crowding the intersection is what leads to gridlock.
It's also illegal in most states to block the intersection even when the light is green.
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RE: Shadowrun: Modern
ORIGINAL POST:
In 50 or so years into the Shadowrun world, do we still have a national government, or has that broken down to the point where there are megacorps and enclaves and societies organically meshing and competing?
There will be an expanded post shortly. After editing this post three times I kind of decided maybe it deserves more, so more it will have.
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RE: CarrierRPI - a Survival Horror MUD
Which makes me ask: What in the background is important for the setting? If it's important that there was world-ending events, then keep it, else how does it help the story?
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RE: Do you believe in paranormal things?
Are you talking about this?
http://www.lightstalking.com/what-is-kirlian-photography-the-science-and-the-myth-revealed/
What he meant was that, e.g., you would mean "electrical field". The term "energy" has a very specific scientific meaning, and part of what he was asking in there is for people to be more specific about what they meant by "energy".
I'm taking a liberal interpretation of what was actually said to seek discussion on all sides.