Posts made by Thenomain

Backwards Day! The constructive stuff first.

@crayon said:

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Quiz. I've been a big fan, ever since experiencing Twenty Questions in Shadowrun 2. It's great for fleshing out characters and really integrating them into a setting, but it can be done horribly, too.

The Quiz I'm talking about is "do you understand this game?" On AetherMux, The Quiz was a simple 10 questions pulled from the first page of various racial, history, and society pages on the Wiki. (This is not entirely true; the game ran before Mediawiki existed, but it's essentially what it was.)

The person could ask for help on the newbie/help channels, skim the obvious page for the answer, or phone a friend. The concern wasn't whether or not they half-assed The Quiz, but that they were forced to visually see some key items of the game world, and were forced to be introduced to the rather simple information.

The newbie experience, and the decontextualized newbie schools, etc. have been something that's bothered me for years, so I'm relived (but I can't rightly say glad given the overuse of them) that I'm not the only one who's had issues. Do you have any examples, regardless of MUSH, MUD, or whatever, even in mainstream gaming, of a tutorial or character generation process or both that you found to be exceptionally immersive and contextual?

Oh this wasn't a Newbie School, this was what in the Mush world we would have called the info-rooms (used far more before we got The Wikis). Maybe that is a Newbie School. Jarring was: Unexplained information hitting my screen after every command. Jarring was: Clown barf ansi explosion. Jarring was: Being told I was stupid for asking why a newbie-unfriendly exit wasn't fixed when the fix was so simple that it wasn't worth the argument that took place.

Jarring was the same kinds of things that would be jarring on you if you, without any help or friends, went to a WoD Mux and logged in and were assailed by the differences and no language to help you along.

Okay, that was fun. Now for:

MYSTERY SCIENCE THENO 2015

@crayon said:

Read a new article on giving players the power to control regional expansion!
http://optionalrealities.com/building-an-elastic-game-world/

In Normal People terms: Player-influenced economies of rarity across multiple in-game (physical) regions.

I found this to be full of high ideals, but basically saying, "Macro Economics: Code it!" Um ... what? Code ... just code a system of rarity across an entire game? One that can be tweaked if a region falls into disuse? I don't have my Masters in Business yet. And yet the biggest hurdle stated to this is: "fitting these sorts of systems into a game’s setting".

Let me tell you, fitting those sorts of systems into a game's setting is the easiest part of it. Even Serenity Mush managed to get that much right, even if they got every single other part of it wrong.

Resource rarity is so easy to code that board games have been getting it right since 19xx -- you know, I can't find when Power Grid was first developed, but it was developed by business majors.

Checking how Witcher 3 managed it, too, is a pretty good starting step.

I'm sorry, I really am, that I feel that "do this, but I can't explain how" is not worth the readers' time, unless Mudders really don't understand the concept of scarcity of goods, and if you think "scarcity of goods" is the driving factor for opening and closing RP Areas.

Maybe it would have served better as a discussion thread, and not a "what-to" article.

Help us generate ideas for future contests and judging criteria!
View the results from July's Character Concept contest!
Offer opinions on the prospects of crowd-sourcing game design!

Excitement! More excitement! Look at the excitement of bureaucracy!

Re: Crowd-Sourcing Game Design:
You have read the other threads here, correct? More like a crowd-sourced anarchy, but sure, why not.

@Miss-Demeanor

Nor mine.

Go us.

@Bobotron said:

@Sponge

Sara-smith and Sara-jones

Unrelated, but a weird question. Does MUX not have player_name_spaces as an option?

It does. Reach had it turned off. By default it's enabled.

@Miss-Demeanor

I'm responding to the bulk of your posts, not just the "short" one.

@Miss-Demeanor,

I think it's also important to come up with a way to run a game and stick with it. The particulars can change, but the generalities should be consistent. It's something I'm echoing from @Ganymede, but to a more narrow conclusion:

You can't let a single player or a small group of players change that. Discussion and honing what we like, what we don't like, and what we think is right is good. Catering to demands of one person's opinion is not.

Logical Conclusion: if a decision maker cannot be trusted to make decisions while playing the game, they cannot be trusted to make the same decisions while taking a break from playing.

Nothing to do with rewarding staff for working on the game, but I thought it was an interesting point that was missed.

I think Cowboy Bebop is still very watchable. The music is still incredible. The animation style is waning. The story and world are still solid.

@Sunny said:

Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that I refuse to reward staff with advantages over other players. They're there to facilitate RP, not benefit themselves.

On the other hand, we as a group demand so much of them—especially on bigger games—that we are having problems finding people willing to staff under these conditions.

The answer is to change the conditions, but that merely sounds easy. Gaining acceptance to it may prove troublesome and even then we can't be sure it will work. We can either try without knowing our chance of success, or not and continue the status-quo, waiting for someone else to do the hard work of effort/success/failure.

@Arkandel said:

Why are those two things mutually exclusive?

They're not. Maybe I missed the entire context of what Sunny said, but I don't read anywhere that's saying this.

What I'm reading is that he's saying Staff has made this a reality far too often.

@Sunny said:

Wait, Spider is your brother?

We need a Quip Contest on a response to this, because I can't think of anything.

@Arkandel said:

@Sunny said:

No. Staff teams essentially said 'whew, the players have mostly taken over storytelling' and stopped.

So you'd rather not have players running plot?

If it's how I'm seeing it, I agree with @Sunny. Too often (twice on the biggest WoD games), when staff got players to run things, they stopped. I'd love to incentivize players, but not if staff isn't willing to keep control and keep things going.

Which FMA? I tried watching the first (FMA) and the second (FMA:Brotherhood) and found the second far more approachable as an ongoing story. With the above statement about Attack on Titan, I think it's notable in my head when I want to finish a series, and I desperately wanted to finish FMA:Brotherhood (and did).

Take this with a huge grain of "My Opinion Only", but I felt that FMA:Brotherhood had a similar overall feel as Akira, as to its pacing and beats between high tension and easing off. In typical Anime fashion, tho, the last three or four episodes are all the finale. It will tear your heart out and eat it in front of you, tho. I loved it.

So I let my Crunchyroll membership lapse back down to unpaid, after not even watching one season of Attack On Titan. As it was the only reason I paid for the 'Roll, it was a bit sad.

It was interesting, but even after the 5 episodes I try to give any anime, as they often work on the slow build philosophy, I still didn't see much to watch. I think I made it to episode 14? Hard to remember now.

The Diana Jones award for 2015 goes to the success of the Guide to Glorantha. I've never heard of this brand before, but kudos to it for overcoming such an insane and difficult history, breaking through thanks to Kickstarter (which itself might need an award from all us nerds one day).

This post goes out to the three of us who like the history of RPGs.

roll20 API to a Mu* interface, side-by-side == I'll be in my bunk.

Storium harkens more to where we came from, when we were essentially turning the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books into a multi-billion dollar computer game genre. They're going back to the books, taking cues from the Fallen London engine, and mixing up something new.

I don't know where this pissing match disagreement of ideas came from, but I found invoking both "roll20" and the "Storium" to be along a path more right than Evennia. I will let the server nerds argue server shortcomings.

@nuku_v

I explained this series of Kickstarters to my (board) gaming group. They were slightly horrified, but it was rather neat to see the project continuing on.

@tragedyjones said:

Thanks @Derp. I am not the poster MSB deserves

But you are the poster that MSB gets.

@ixokai said:

What unformatter do you use, Thenomain?

I started in my own editor, then switched over to Muxify. If you're getting mail complaints, this is my older unformatter.

To use Muxify with this stuff, you'll need to do three things:

1. Grep edit ^-- to \\ -- and possibly comment `* ... *' around my infamous notes to myself.
2. Indent everything but the first line of an attribute.
   2a. Sometimes you'll have to comment out 'test' code, too.
3. BEWARE: I do use c.<xxx>\* sometimes, where the * is literal! Muxify doesn't like this. I cannot help that yet.

@Bobotron said:

Attribute trees are love.

Meh. I prefer my own solution. But then, doesn't everyone prefer what they prefer.

I'm asked to submit an article, I submit it, and I hear nothing back. Nothing.

To be honest, with what I submitted, I'm kind of disappointed in it, but @EmmahSue won't give me writer's tips. Maybe she has too much porn on her brain.

I don't have time to comment about the artciles now. Maybe soon.

@crayon said:

They do point out that modern computer games have tutorials, and this is something we in the Mush world have dropped entirely. Coding a tutorial is not unlike coding a puzzle, and that's not our focus anymore so we, perhaps lamentably, have forgotten that people need taught. Wikis are starting to pick up the slack, but I think it's just starting.

How do you feel about the potential of, say, contextualized story-based tutorials that are usually worked into the beginnings of games like those in the Elder Scrolls series, if you're familiar?

This doesn't help the Mush-style lack of puzzles, but yes, I was thinking something along those lines.

For Mushes, the quiz. We've been back and forth about The Quiz in the past eight years, because it can be stupidly done or intelligently done. The same can be said about more traditional video game tutorials, especially in the video game world. (Have you heard of Extra Credits? Have you watched it? If not, do so. Repeatedly.)

The Quiz, in my mind, is "do you get it?" Do you get the theme, the setting? Do you get that we think it's kind of serious? Do you get that this is based on a rules book that you should probably own, or at least have regular access to? Do You Get It?

I've never been a big fan of decontextualized tutorials or tutorials that are comprised of pauses, pop-ups, or walls of text. I guess it disrupts that immersive experience [...]

This describes my 30 Minutes of Mud Experience. So much was jarring, in my way, and while some people tried to be helpful others were harmful to easing me into it.

Unlike ... what ... Mushing/Mudding? If this isn't community gaming, we have seriously lost touch with the concept of "fun".

As in non-roleplay gaming.

I actually knew that. A lot of what I find wrong with Mu* gaming is that we have our cliquish language, and sometimes we forget that if we want to be inclusive, we have to sometimes realize that context is not universal.

It was obvious the second you read the article, too. So it was a slightly tongue-in-cheek reference to the above.

I cannot tell you how many times through each play through of DA:I that I was confused because they drop you into the situation in media fucking res. I was so confused why nobody was blaming Anders and the Kirkwall incident for the Mage uprising, like I was supposed to know what happened at some Circle of Magi somewhere.

It came together eventually, but it was awkward and painful in the way of unexpected speed bumps on a back road when you want to go 35. Even the history of your own character was revealed in fits and spurts. I was replying about growing up "Tal-Vashoth" before I knew that the word had history that I probably should have known at the time.

Okay, enough bitching. Time to finish my second play through.

@HelloRaptor said:

usb key

I love how there are a thousand names for this piece of electronics.

Thanks for the updates. I'm most interested to know how it breaks games that you had to do workarounds for Windows 8. (Mainly Fallout 3.) The usual legacy-ish question.