Eh, it comes up every few years. Game design philosophy is never a bad one to have.
Posts made by Thenomain
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RE: How does a Mu* become successful?
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RE: 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.
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RE: Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes
I believe you missed an important part of @Lotherio's text: He is setting up a game where it doesn't matter. I can't tell if you're telling him that he's wrong to do so, but it sure seems like it.
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RE: How does a Mu* become successful?
@ThatOneDude said in How does a Mu* become successful?:
I love PK! No one else really enjoys it for the fun it can be though
One of the people I work with plays Rust for the challenge and the back-and-forth PK. And if people you know also love it? Great! If not? Well? Why is it their problem?
I've laughed my ass off about situations where I've lost, or adored the story told, but this is my angle, and my angle doesn't work for you. Visa-versa. Note in that video (you did watch the video, right?), neither Bartle nor the Extra Credits crew said who was responsible for the fun. In fact, they say what we've always known: Those who aren't having fun leave.
In fact, that's what I get out of every time someone puts the words "mush" and "successful" together: How do we stop people from leaving?
If you're secretly trying to deconstruct BitN, I can't help you. I listen to staff chat (because coder) and I hear more "hee hee that was awesome" more than "goddamn it, insert-player-name-here", so I have to believe that staff are enjoying the game. I also have to assume that anyone playing there is enjoying themselves enough to play there, or I have to wonder about their sanity. Sounds like a winner to me.
THAT SAID, I have continued playing on games I didn't enjoy, but I enjoyed the people I was with. People are looking for the key to upward positive feedback and game growth. This is it. One person, @ThatGuyThere, has it right on. Everything past that is a deconstruction about what you enjoy about a game.
There is a certain tipping point where the game can be complete and utter shit with shit staffers and shit situations and still have a high population. I put this critical mass around 20 players. In the video (you watched the video, right?), this is the social circle. Maybe all that happens is TS and IC Drama, but hey, it's popular, right? I have to believe the people there are enjoying themselves, because anything else is just sad.
Please Note: Fun is not the same as Enjoyment. I usually assume people mean the latter when they say the former, but we can all enjoy ourselves without having 'fun'.
So yeah, +1 to @ThatGuyThere for the truest answer, and +1 to everyone else for figuring out how to make that happen.
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RE: Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes
@Pandora said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
That lack of uniformity in determination seems like it could easily turn into hard feelings about favoritism or what have you. 'Bob got saved by an NPC doctor after he got stabbed in the chest, but I died after a PC doctor botched his roll. I want a do-over.'
This is a problem in RPG design, too, not just Mushes or Muds. Have you ever watched the comedy short, "The Gamers"? They do this all the time. At the table, it doesn't matter because the rules at the table are the rules for your reality. In game design, however, my preferred answer is: If you choose to roll the dice, you abide by the system.
MUDs aren't perfect, but if you've got a doctor, you're saved, and if you don't have a doctor, here's hoping you remembered to set your spouse/beneficiaries before you kicked the bucket.
This strikes me as a concession, not a solution, and what if the doctor has to roll the dice, those dice are just part of the 'health system' code that you don't see? See Above.
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RE: How does a Mu* become successful?
Random Comments!
Talking about Bartle: Balancing an MMO Ecosystem - Getting a Mix of Player Types - Extra Credits
Yeah, watch this.
@ThatOneDude, you come across to me as a lot more of an Achiever than a Socializer, with a hint of Killer. (Okay, maybe just toward me, but anyway.) I can understand why you might have troubles settling into some Mushes as there is not enough for you to do, the PvE elements not hitting you the right way. I don't have an answer, per se, but I see part of your question as partially "why aren't I having fun". It's a question I ask myself all the time.
I may be wrong in my guesswork, but that's not the important part. I continue.
But why doesn't a small game have more achievement? It has less socializing, which itself turns to less socializing (watch the video), which leads to more people sitting waiting to do something. I think BitN does a pretty good job of creating an atmosphere where anyone who wants to run events without the drawback of having to jump through hoops. In that way, BitN is extremely successful, and I think the staff was counting on this creating the popularity that would create an upward feedback spiral.
Perhaps they need more proactive explorers (e.g., writers)? An interesting thought. Anyhow.
@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:
As for secrets and such, I've seen it emulated on MUSHes too. I mentioned Nightmare LP Mud as my favorite, because it seemed to be one at the time that hid objects and descriptions. One had to read the entire desc and look at each object to see if there was more too it. A few Mu*s outside of MUDs have done this and hidden it enough so there were no visible local views or +views, but most players outside of MUDs don't tend to think to 'look' at every thing in the desc just to see if there is more too it.
Mushes used to do this all the time. TinyTIM (probably the first Mush) expanded on Mud's scant in-game building tools into more code-like features to make it easier to do. It's why I started Mush Coding. How to create puzzles. How to create interactive objects. How to have room-based commands. How to create mobs and mob spawners. (Trufax: User-created commands used to be locked exits with a coded fail, @afail. My earliest interactive loops were @trigger, @set, and @if. Who winced? You have no idea how proud I was that it worked.)
What happened was, probably, World of Darkness. The first WoD game, Vampire, came when all us casual coder kids and online gamer brats were in college. Here was this cool, edgy game where you could be the bad guy and sulk in the darkness and listen to Rage Against the Machine all night and never die and oh come on, it was the nineties, what do you expect.
Anyhow, having a simple platform where you can quickly prototype ideas meant that you could build, code, and socialize all within the same space. It just so happened the first WoD game was a Mush and not a Moo (which probably would have changed everything).
@Kestrel, I'm drawing your attention here in case you're skimming (god knows I do): Moo used an in-game editor but a more realistic, flexible language. One of the single worst things about using Mush for coding is that it can be ten times harder to do something cool in Mush than almost any other language.
It's not that Mushes can't have mobs and things, a gigantic game called Firan proved that wrong, it's that it's not worth it. I mean, we're busy implementing a codified RPG. God, the language code we used to have was pretty damn complex too. At one point, if you knew French you could pick up smaller snippets of other Romance Languages depending on how similar or dissimilar they were from French, all the way down to "I don't know what they're saying, but I know that it's kinda Greek-like" for 'Ancient Greek'.
You want secrets? Damn did we have them. It's possible. It takes time, but the most important thing as a game is will someone use it because if not, why bother? And people started complaining about it. And we killed the general WoD secrets culture. And it faded into obscurity.
I also remember Mud School. Mush and especially Penn had the same thing. Most of it's online. Most of it's helpful. If you remember the "Free Code Room", I stole that from TinyTIM's "MushRoom" (puns and puns). Maybe it is time to stop constricting build quota.
@Lotherio said in How does a Mu* become successful?:
Also @Thenomain mentioned considering changing from pages to grid wandering.
I am an Explorer. Above all else, I like finding new places, new things, new people, new ideas, new events, new new new. If I can't find it, I make it. (Coder, duh.) If I can't find it or make it, I get belligerent and sulk and sometimes I lash out. It's a problem and therefore it must be solved, and if I can't solve it then why am I there?
But I'm curious if MUSH could benefit from some of these concepts, dark grid, unfindable, interactive descriptions.
See Above: Been there done that. Right now the culture in WoD Mushes (specifically WoD Mushes even if they're running Chronicles) is to kill the OOC Drama. That doesn't mean you can't try, but I don't think that will be the tipping point to gain or lose players. I think the game's culture does that, the goal, the interactivity, the staff.
TL;DR: Mushes have become RPG Game System Simulators where Theme is King. They can be anything, but this is what they ended up being. Most people here are WoD Mushers which also skews what we talk about to a kind of insular community, and sadly sometimes an echo-chamber. This number is changing, and at a nice pace, and I welcome the new more open world of talking about game implementation in general.
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RE: Better Places Code
Passed on from @Chime : Change the at-table prefix to something easier to parse. In her words, "it should be an obviously OOC tag indicating that the following pose had limited-targets"
This has halfway been mentioned, but this change even if the pose is place-only.
[by the fountain] Thenomain does his theno-things.
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RE: Better Places Code
Place Pose Thoughts:
""
Say
::
Pose
;;
The other kind of pose
||
Emit
<double backtic>
OOCYour 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.
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RE: Better Places Code
@faraday said in Better Places Code:
@Thenomain said in Better Places Code:
Because immersion.
Yeah, I get it - and I've coded some of that stuff too. It just still grates on me at some basic level.
Yeah, because it's dumb. Rassafrasssin' fragram narramfgrrrrr.
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RE: Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes
We are trying to both help you understand and understand ourselves how the culture works. What, you thought we knew? A lot of us are arguing with ourselves and around you.
It now sounds like the sour taste in your mouth is that you didn't have the opportunity to have that scene collapse ICly.
To which I am going to tell you again: Then next time collapse it ICly, just maintain respect for the game and its players.
Sheesh.
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RE: Better Places Code
Because immersion.
Because that's why 'knock' code. Because that's why radio code. Because it's nice to have a simple thing to type (pp thenomain=You jerk!) that also engages people in the room with you.
I've coded some of those horrible systems where it remembers phone numbers, would ring to someone's home if they didn't have a cell, people could disguise their voices, and all of that needs to die in a fire. But the simple system to create 'bob is on the phone laughing his ass off' speaks strongly to some players.
That's why I do it. Under duress in this case, but I feel my job as coder is to support the game. Engaging players is supporting the game at the highest level, even higher than making staff's job easier.
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RE: Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes
Incidentally, I have all but stopped RPing on Fallcoast because almost every time I try to page someone with "want to rp?" I get "no". Yet when I just show up in scenes, I enjoy myself. Part of my diatribe must be me gathering up the courage to finding scenes the old fashioned way: Seeing who's where and going there and seeing what happens next. Hell, this is how I did things on Haunted Memories, and everyone hated me until they found out I played Vera and I can't tell you how many people told me that I was awesome. And that was only, what, five years ago?
Yeah, I think it's time for us to change it up again.
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RE: Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes
@Kanye-Qwest said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
Part of my question is: How do G & H know there's anything going on in the Town Square? With Bob's Party I'm presuming you were invited. How would you invite yourself to Town Square?
You don't need to be invited to a town square. It's there for people to hang out in. Not approved people. Not You and Your Friends. People. Anyone not being a disruptive dick and/or breaking laws may hang out in a town square.
But they wanted to engage the scene, not the location in the scene. That is a critical distinction that we've had small arguments in this thread about: You don't own the location just because you're in a scene there. (So yes, re-define my use of 'location' in the quoted section above.)
It also informs my opinion about scening in public: You never have to ask to go somewhere other people are. In fact, I'm going to pull a 180 from the other people in this thread: There is no place with an existing scene that you have to gain express permission to get to. All barriers are other because of IC or out of RESPECT. This is why you must have respect for the game and the players on the game.
The people there maybe would have left because their ability to follow things was too disrupted, but that's also on them, not just on you. Both of you take responsibility for it. Negotiate for it either through OOC means (page) or IC means (getting ignored). The former is explicit social contract, the latter is implied social contract.
Phew, that was a lot of diatribe there.
So yeah, @Kestrel, don't feel like you were pushed away because you weren't. You tried out the explicit social contract negotiation of OOC, and you're not used to it. So try it your way.
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RE: Better Places Code
@ixokai said in Better Places Code:
Sigh. Why do people not read the front stuff and only read the back stuff.
Note: When you later in this thread misinterpret someone else's thought process, I'm going to derail this thread to remind you that you said this. In the meantime, this is just a bookmark to remind myself later. Kthx.
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RE: Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes
Part of my question is: How do G & H know there's anything going on in the Town Square? With Bob's Party I'm presuming you were invited. How would you invite yourself to Town Square?
I ask this in part because you are framing a lot of this as "What Would Happen IC". In trying to help you understand the OOC culture, I'm pointing out that you already are acting on OOC information, which lead you to paging. You engaged in OOC behavior in order to find a scene to play in.
I call this "There Is No Such Thing As Purely IC". That doesn't negate your complaint, but is meant to aim at the argument that the people you wanted to interact with were not being IC, and that's why you feel pushed away. OOC was already engaged; you just skipped a bunch of steps by paging.
So lets keep it IC. You then say that G & H want to go to the Town Square because of a reason they invent, and show up and find out there are people there already. Oh happy day! If they're all busy with their own thing, then you and H pose around with each other some more, trying to negotiate yourselves into the scene.
Maybe people leave because it's IC because they hate G or H, fine. But maybe they leave because they themselves can no longer as a player negotiate the scene. What do you do then? You arrive and the scene breaks down and everyone moves on. This is almost the worst case scenario. Are you still okay with that?
If you are, then you don't page and just show up. You aren't your brother's keeper, and you can figure out how to negotiate into someone's scene a little better next time. This is 100% fine and how we used to do things in Mushes. Doing it this way isn't rude, it's engaging. Using IC to get engagement with scenes and play is okay. If anyone tells you that it's not okay, then it's part of their expectations and they can get over it.
Or as someone else said: Don't take the advice as set in stone. It's all just advice. Try it your way until you learn a new way. You be you.
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RE: Better Places Code
@ixokai, my thought on it has been addressed already:
@Arkandel said in Better Places Code:
Any implementation of places must be:
- Easy to use. If it requires more than two commands total - the equivalent of @emit and say, for instance, and/or perhaps lacking a convenient easily memorable alias it can still fail.
Rooms are not useful for cases where the separation between scenes is not black-and-white. To me it's like saying, "Who needs folders? Just create another partition." Because the logical relation between two sets of files is important, and I don't need to go through all the work to set up and all the peculiarities to make them either partially or or not-at-all logically connected.
Or in other terms: A place is something that is logically connected to things around it. A room is something that is logically separated from things around it.
It's no more re-inventing rooms than phone code is re-inventing page. (And I haaaaate phone code, yet a huge number of people demand that I add it whenever I'm around. Stupid phone code. Rar.)
I agree about channel-izing places, tho. I do think a large point of places code is to reduce spam, and once people culturally start using it to react to things at other tables, the option to opt-out is removed from you.
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RE: RL Anger
I've been watching a Let's Play of Danganronpa which is one part visual novel and one part mini-games about a mystery. As a way to further part, I like the visual novel motif. I just keep getting caught up in stories that end with "and everything goes to shit". Thanks, guys.