Posts made by Thenomain

@TNP said:

@Thenomain said:

We're #1! You're #0!

Who is number one? You are number six.

I am the new Number Two.

@crayon said:

Which can be especially problematic with some MUD codebases given that the majority of them weren't really developed with any sort of focus on roleplay, writing, or storytelling in mind.

This is a huge reason why I find the prerequisites for listing a game on your site to be specious.

Okay, Mystery Science Theno 3000 time:

Jeshin writes on where text-based games fit into the bigger picture of gaming, and the powers of text as a gaming medium!
http://optionalrealities.com/the-text-based-rpg-unlimited-potential/

Oh, wow, that title isn't biased at all. I'm pretty sure that text-based games fit nowhere into Sinistar or Hatfall.

I mean, I suppose someone had to write the text, "I HUNGER." On the other hand, I doubt that counts.

The character concept competition is still underway! Submit a character idea and potentially win cash!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=198.0

Bribing the social crowd for page views and artificial friends is pretty popular. This must count as your advertising budget.

Engage in game design discussion on integrating age into skill systems...
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=218.0

Been there, done that, went well but not for everyone. What's to discuss?

...and the merits of systems that gate content to preserve scarcity based on player rewards.
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=217.0

aka: Economic Systems, they're the best!

Or come sign up for our first round of community mafia...
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=214.0

No thanks; the community mafia posts here enough already.

...Or other games!
http://optionalrealities.com/forums/index.php?topic=210.0

Like Mushes without permadeath or automated systems? Because those are my favorite. Tell me when you get Space Trader, then we'll talk.

Tying a few of the above together: I wrote Space Trader fanfic, back in the day. Yes, really. I also wrote the start of "A Year In the Life" for SMAC where I was going to write out a short game of this from a peon's view, but got no further than Year Three before I gave it up.

That fourth link is something I'd like to hear a little bit from the MUSH community on

What, not the third link? Because I'm pretty sure that The Mush Community has a pretty solid idea of what skill systems are about, and we've played around quite a lot with age and skills, to greater or lesser extent, over the past ten, fifteen years.

I liked what we did with it on TwoMoonsMUSH where the characters live for hundreds of years, but it turns out pretty petty on a lot of other games.

How do MUSHes typically approach situations where you want to limit players' access to things like certain races or powers to preserve some level of IC scarcity

Either curate it, quota it, or let everyone have it. There is no typical answer, because it's driven by theme and what people want out of gameplay.

For example, it would be utterly stupid for someone to quota the number of supernaturals on a World of Darkness game (okay, for you non-RPGers, an Underworld game), even though by setting they are pretty rare. By theme, they are all over the place.

On the other hand, on a Dresden Files game focused around the Wizard Court (sorry, whatever it's called), having the vampire players dominate the game may throw off the intent of the game. If by game design you decide this is the case, you may have to find some way of limiting it. This isn't a horrible thing as long as you're up front about it.

The other option is that the Mud-centric community is content with their code-base options. This is like the Mush-centric community being content with their code-base options. Pro-tip: We are not; we just put up with it because it's what we do.

My 30-minute experience with MUDs indicate to me that the same thing is going on there.

KDE should make you angry.

I think I would have not bought Lisa if I had paid attention that it was jrpg-style turn-based combat, but with 'overwhelmingly positive' and all this money not burning a hole in my pocket because it doesn't exist, I picked it up anyway. We'll see how far I make it.

I made it through Breath of Death VII: The Beginning while barely knowing what was going on, so it's possible.

Still not playing Final Fantasy VII.

I have an objection that your stated goal is not in line with one of your practices. I have a smaller objection that the practices I'm talking about are not listed on the associated page.

@Jeshin

Except for what games you list, which must 1) be cold, 2) can melt, 3) are made from a milk or cream base.

As I mentioned earlier, there are no guidelines on the board themselves. I suppose I wouldn't still be harping on this if I didn't know how exclusionary it was.

Oh my lord:

• Portray the Pentacle as an Alliance
• Show the Orders as mystery cults

Hello Mage. Nice to meet you again.

What, did someone forget to post when the Wizened alpha write-up came out? Hello again, Nockers! I have missed you too.

@Gingerlily

Cake, Ice Cream

Someone came into our Cake Decoration (and Rogue Elements) conglomerate and said they're advertising desserts and making a newsletter for dessert shops of every kind, but we can only show cakes if they 1) are cold, 2) can melt, 3) are made from a milk or cream base.

I will accept that a dessert that can melt has a bit of urgency to it that maybe they enjoy in their post-meal delights, but saying you're for all desserts but will only really feature desserts that are nearly Ice Cream may not be the best way to approach it. A very small number of cake-decorators work for Baskin Robins.

Okay, my example is horrible, but in my defense I like both cake and iced cream and maybe a dessert-shop newsletter should dial it back if it wants to call itself "a place for all dessert makers to talk about their thing".

@Gingerlily said:

Does that make more sense?

It absolutely does.

See, I have a roundabout point, and that is that some terms are being talked about as if they were chiseled out of marble. We all probably feel that way about some of The Way We Do Things, but a different group of people may just look at you funny, like you walked out of some religious compound and are withstanding that the world works a different way.

I am all for Muds Being Muds, and Mushes Being Mushes, and I probably could enjoy a Mud for what it is, but that's not what's going on here.

they are all perfectly legitimate, lovely ways to be geeky!

Yeah! Go geeky! Let's accept more than one set of qualifications! Acceptance!

A follow-up, separate from the above discussion:

It occurs to me that I am on a crusade, and that I am passionate about this thread and it's not really clear why, so I'm going to spell it out.

1. The way that OR is presenting itself on its own website is to tie all the different Mu* games together. And yet, the prerequisites for listing these selfsame games are based exclusively on Mud understandings and philosophies. I don't see any attempt to reach out, but to accept those who already fit the mold. This strikes me as disingenuous, misleading, and as someone who quite enjoys his own part of the community I would feel I was doing everyone in non-Mud communities a disservice if I didn't point this out.

2. On a personal level, it really ticks me off when someone says they're being representative of me, personally, without having one clue who I am or what I do. This is making me hotter on the topic than I might normally be. I love a good nonsense philosophical discussion as much as the next person, but don't tell me that you have my best interests at heart unless you have the slightest clue what those interests are.

I'm not going to stop being passionate on these items, but since I am dominating the derailment of this thread, I thought maybe I should be fair and put myself in my place. After all, you can't build bridges without a good foundation. Sometimes I'm the one building bridges, sometimes I'm not.

Welcome to the Soapbox.

You know, I don't mean to be a dick (er, more than usual), but I'm still looking forward to @Gingerlily's take on this. Ginger, when you can!

@Jeshin

The fact some games have a respawn thing with no concept of perma-death is because of where MUDs came from.

Mushes come from the same source as Muds, so yeah, I understand, I just don't buy it.

@crayon

It doesn't have to be, really.

This is a satisfying answer. I mean, no, it doesn't answer the problem but it does admit there is a situation that just is. Why do Mushes not have "automated code" as defined by the Mud community? Because we don't do things that way. But lo, it continues!

There really aren't that many codebases that are already well-suited to it

Which is where @Alzie chimes in, below. Coders be coders, and I suspected this was part of the reason.

On the other hand, when you simply integrate a lack of death into your setting and your world, it can create a feeling that there's a lack of stakes.

It can, but when I set to pass someone on the freeway I can create a stressful situation that may lead to injury or in very extreme cases death. I have gone pretty far out of my way coming up with situation after situation where the lack of perma-death could be fun.

Every long-running superhero comic ever, for a start.

Is something really heroic if there's no real permanent risk?

While I understand the allure of the Monomyth and it does make a fairly consistently good story, there are so many other options out there. Cutting them off because of it might not work is ... nnh, it feels like cutting off one's nose in spite of one's avoidance of new food. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

And as I've told @Jeshin a few times, there are more risks than death. Can we talk about risks that are not death for once?

Planescape: Torrent, perhaps the best written cRPG (yes, I'd put it over the original Fallout), avoids death without tossing out risk. And if you can't call that guy a hero, I'm going to have to ask you to don your Fighting Trousers!

The extremely-popular-in-its-day RPG 7th Sea allows the owner of the character to decide if death is on the table.

Fate Core has a solid mechanic built around this, and it's hard to find a modern RPG more centered on heroic actions.

@Alzie

So basically: It is not easy to change mud hardcode.

I believe @crayon is violently agreeing with you.

@Jeshin said:

You have to understand the originator of MUDs

I think you don't understand your audience. Yes, I have to understand the history of MUDs. I already understand the history of MUDs. I think a lot of us here understand Zork and, truly, Adventure (where we all come from). I follow up with two words: Ultima Online. Yeah, we know.

My question to @Gingerlily was "why is it black or white?" The answer of "because history" explains how we got here, but not why this has to be. Nobody has to be surprised when someone comes back from the dead if that's the way the game works, and if the game is not meant to work that way, then something is out of sync.

So I'm not satisfied. "We do this mental gymnastics because we've always done this mental gymnastics." Tautology for Fun and Profit. I'm sure a lot of people are content with letting things lie, but I'm not, and so I want to know what this behavior serves, what is it for.

@Gingerlily said:

Yeah. On MUDs where there is no permanent death, characters have to act as if they are shocked every time someone 'dies' and then is returned.

Why?

This is what's baffling me.

If nobody truly dies, why do you have to be surprised one bit?

What in theme or setting is enforcing this? And since IMO code is there to supoport and not define the game, if theme and setting say that death is permanent, why doesn't the code? Or hell, why does staff allow it?

There's a disconnect going on here. Not in how you and I are talking, but in how your Example Mud treats its own game. It sounds like Example Mud doesn't respect its own material, and if it doesn't then why should anyone else?

The games I'm talking about aren't about not having the "perma-" part, but not having the "death" part. Death without permadeath should have a very good explanation for it, both for the theme and the gameplay itself.

That said, I now want to create a game where non-perma-death is allowed on a game with death. FreeMarket (the RPG) is a pretty good example of this.

Eclipse Phase is another good example of this.

One of these two is an insanely popular, very dark, nearly dystopian cyberpunkish trans-humanism game that is free to download.

Knowing that your opponent may not stay dead when you kill them changes everything. I suspect that the King in @Jeshin's example was playing the OOC Bullshit "Because I Can" game. On the other hand, it could have also been thematic and cause severe consequences throughout the game world that would force people to find a way to depose him, destroy his power-base, and cause an epic that could be told about for years to come.

On the other other hand, it could also be tiresome and emotionally draining on the players having to deal with crap they didn't want to deal with just because one person thought it was a cool idea, but now everyone's stuck with it. Two sides of the same coin.

We in the Mush world also have to, from time to time, deal with OOC griefing. Believe me, permadeath doesn't stop these people.

The same way superhero comics explain it.

@Gingerlily
I don't know what you mean that there is "OOCness where there is no permadeath." There is OOCness everywhere. As far as I can tell, there is no multiplayer computer game so complete that there is a perfect lack of OOCing.

That is, there is also OOCness where there is permadeath.

Were you talking about something more specific?

Very tired, not focusing well, will assume lots of words meant "by mud centric view for mud centric viewers don't understand other views". Will point out irony-slash-inconsistency of this when contrasted to the word "all" in mission statement. May clean up this post later for accuracy and content.

@Jeshin said:

RPI technically

What are the community standards to being called an RPI? You have been taking a stance of "technically correct is the best correct", so show me on the interwebs where RPI is defined.

I also like you, @Jeshin, as you are taking my more abrasive comments as comments first, abrasive second, and my views about what is and isn't Muds and what Mudders are about is mostly because of your existence here.

@Arkandel,

You mean this?

(Sad Trombone.)