One of the things I appreciated about Aether was there was no randomness. You decided what '15% better' meant. Almost everyone recognized that the person on the other end of the screen was also involved and added that to their pose.
As people here were talking about "why don't people talk about this OOC?", here's a system where exactly that happened, and was quick.
@arkandel said in How to use Potato MU Client:
@skew said in How to use Potato MU Client:
@testament I don't use spawn windows
I'm so sorry.
Spawn windows are good for some, but I have never been able to get them to be anything more than either a distraction or something I will ignore for hours.
What I like about @faraday's concept is that it adds Mudlike elements to our Mushlike expectations, which is something we should be embracing. As @Misadventure said once long ago (on Wora): We should make the computer do the hard things that we can't do in RPGs.
But as usual, I'm going to play That Makes Me Think Of:
Back on AetherMux, the entire conflict resolution system went something like this (I can't remember the exact inputs so ignore this):
<thenomain types>: +compare strength+weaponry=faraday dexterity+dodge
<game replies>: Thenomain is trying to compare his <foo> to your <bar>.
<faraday types>: +compare/accept thenomain
<game replies>: Faraday narrowly succeeds by 15%
<faraday poses>: The claymore comes down slowly on Faraday's side,
cutting through her coat and drawing a red line across her skin.
There's $300 she won't see again in a hurry.
There was no limitation to what could be compared, no hard system, just what the players decided was appropriate for the situation.
The game never rolls anything; it just compared values. It helped that the stats were all 0-50 allowing for a decent percentage comparison, but the concept is there: The game didn't have a barely-nonbinary success/fail system. You compared results and decided what that meant.
People used this for social interactions all the time.
This was a fairly consent-heavy game, but everyone knew this going in and people would lose the small things.
Note: Ainneve is Evennia spelled backwards. It took me longer than 5 seconds to notice that. Alas.
@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
What, exactly, is the functionality expected from these three commands
Faraday explained it, but I'll break it down further:
The goal of a lot of Mushlike commands are to facilitate the role-play process, which is usually the primary concern of a Mush.
The main reason I pushed "who" is because it's simple and easy to grasp for a Musher and default WHO output tends to be ugly as sin. It really does serve the same purpose as a guild-based Mud's who: Give me more than just who's online, but a little bit of critical information about them. What is "critical information" will change from game to game.
The main reason I'm not looking for a way to edit the game's default command ("who") is because as a Mush coder, I'm used to making tools for games and not building a game where everything is integrated at every level. Sure, re-creating "who" could be just as easily done in the default command itself, but that is incidental of which of the Basic Three Character-Info Commands I was looking for first.
That is, if we did "finger" first, we wouldn't be having that discussion, but to be honest I thought "who" was a better choice to start with.
I'll be working on "finger" as soon as my Evennia server decides to stop having memory errors on Python 2.7.15. (edit: I uninstall/reinstalled. Works now.)
@sab said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
So I think one of the major things about Evennia that's overlooked from the perspective of the people who have some experience working on it, is that a lot of the people interested in using it to develop a game are coming into it with absolutely no coding skills at all. They might have ideas for systems--almost certainly things that they've experienced in games before, or would like to iterate on--but beyond that, they're starting from either zero, or a concept of what coding might be.
This is a problem with getting people developing TinyMUX (and Penn and Rhost) too. This has always been a problem. I have always taken the approach to take something that people know what it does and disassemble it in front of them.
In order:
Each builds on concepts of the previous, and people can start to see the patterns in the logic.
There are no tutorials for these in Mush; the benefit there is that you get to mess around with code while playing a game and socializing. People in the Mushlikes learn these things because they either a) want to help build (or "craft"), or b) have a project in mind. Either way, Step 1 in our world has always been find someone to help you out.
If anyone's interested in starting from 0/10 and working towards like, 3 or some shit, hit me up, I'm happy to share whatever I figure out.
I'm going to again hilite the Evennia IRC or Discord channel and ooze praise from my pores like an excited puppy.
Anyone and everyone who is willing to share gets lumped into that praise.
@pyrephox said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
@sparks That would also be helpful! It might be helpful in a different way, but it would certainly lower the bar for usability to get started.
Ninja'd.
People can take apart what's there if it's well-done and/or basic enough. The tutorial part could be, "Look here. Now look there. See how these things work? Now do stuff!"
@faraday said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
Just to be clear - I wasn't saying people would leave the game en masse or refuse to play there. I just think folks avoid interacting with systems unless they either a) buy into them or b) are forced to use them.
And this is why people would, because of Ganymede's primary conceit:
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
Let's suppose for a moment that the rules will always be enforced by staff when needed.
For this my "no" was heavily defined as "because this sounds like combat". If it's not like combat, but some other conflict system that's quick and easy, then I can see people using it.
I really can see people using it anyhow, but for the sake of discussion I wanted to start with the pushback and "no, but also yes" doesn't have the same impact.
I agree with a lot of what @Derp says, but for the WoD crowd I also believe in what I said.
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
@derp said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
At the end of the day, the rules don't get taken seriously because of desuetude, essentially. It's not that the rules aren't there, it's just that people have gotten so used to being able to break them that they have come to expect they will be ignored.
Let's suppose for a moment that the rules will always be enforced by staff when needed.
Would people still use social stats to resolve conflict? Why or why not?
No.
I wish I played on Return to Kingsmouth to see how they approached these things. I've seen a few people in this thread complain how interweaving RP into a combat scene is clunky and they'd skip it if they could, and that is so far the best we can do with WoD/CoD combat.
In Tabletop, combat is fun. Rolling to hit and the GM deciding your abysmal result meant you stepped on the hidden yellow spore and now you're charmed and your fellow players have to figure out a way to get you out of combat without killing you? FUN.
WoD Combat on Mu*s are tedious. Gone is the era of a single scene taking two days to resolve (I am not kidding, peeps), but damn it's still involved and you still have to wait ten minutes for your turn and guh.
So maybe the comparison is not the best one, at least not for me.
@faraday said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
@kanye-qwest said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
There is copious information on the basics of python available, I feel like also including all that in the Evennia documentation would make it unwieldy.
That may well be, but you also have to recognize that the copious information on the basics of python can be overwhelming to someone who's only ever coded via MUSHcode. Server admin, python, source control... it's a lot to take in.
And there's a lot going on here that is far, far beyond the basics of python. Some of it is beyond the intermediaries of Python. This is why the Evennia IRC/Discord is such a boon, and the community patient and good and awesome at recognizing the difference between "frustrated" and "troll".
I know that, you know that, Griatch knows that, really anybody involved in this project knows that. I will gush again about everyone involved for being the kind of people we who play Mush are surprised to find in the world. Y'know, adults.
--
My goal right now is to get to "code python". While picking up virualenv along the way is interesting and I'm glad for the knowledge, but it has absolutely gotten in the way of getting to 'basic'. This is what in the adult world is called a challenge to overcome, and I am willing to take on any role that I can to help.
Sadly, this is limited to "constructive criticism" and "rough suggestions". Believe me, Not-Actually-Strawwoman, when I get to a point where I can do more I'll be there like shareware.
In Changeling the Lost (1e), Hedgespun Rainments give you a social benefit in courtly situations.
There are many kiths and powers based on social interaction.
Yet I almost never saw anyone use them.
I don't know if this is because there's a tacit "no social rolls against PCs", there's a more obvious "if I do this people will drag this into a headache that I can avoid", or what.
But they're there.
Details are there.
Social tools are there.
It just doesn't click, so people don't use them.
@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
Not sure this can really be more front and center than it is now - the virtualenv is described (with a link to the glossary for extra detail) and activated for the first time as part of the very installation steps that installs and starts Evennia.
And never brought up again.
In the Quickstart, setting the environment is Step 4, starting Evennia is Step 10.
In the Linux setup, it's mentioned five code boxes before starting Evennia.
All of the steps in the middle are run once, and only once, for installation.
In the Administration docs "Start Stop Reload" it is not mentioned at all.
Knowing what virtualenv is and does is an intermediate topic and for some game-runners they might not even need to find out, just that it needs to be done. The documentation is not good at stressing that it needs to be done.
There is now a statement in the very last paragraph of the virtualenv glossary statement, but in none of these instances does "front and center" come to mind.
--
edit to readers: Griatch and I are also talking about this on the Evennia Discord/IRC. A lot of this has been at least considered by the time you get there. I don't dislike the Evennia documentation, I just think it could be better for us utter newbs and I'm passionate about helping.
MUCH PASSION. SO CRITIQUE. WOW.
@griatch said in Make Evennia 'more accessible' - ideas?:
So you find the glossary solution un-helpful then?
Not at all. As a glossary it's very helpful, in the way that a dictionary is helpful for someone trying to teach themselves English. But when you're in an English class, reinforcement and reminders should be baked into the lessons.
I'm sad you think "You should know this by now" sums up the philosophy of ten years of documentation work for Evennia.
I don't. The logic went this:
Me: XXX should remind you to enter the virtualenv.
You: That's pretty much the standard of running Evennia at that point.
Me: As a learning document, remind people anyway.
As someone trying to pick this up with nothing more than the documentation, the documentation is fine as documentation but less so as a How-To document. As I didn't see any How-To documents past "set Evennia up for the first time" where turning on the virtualenv for the first time is buried several instructions behind starting up Evennia itself.
I can't verify if the documents are bad. They're very easy to read and I appreciate that, they're just easy to read and dotted with Latin phrases, or phrases that might as well be Latin to me.
I've had a busy few days and this thread has exploded, so let me briefly say:
"You should know this by now" is not the approach I see in many technical educational documents. Those I've been to where there is a user response section often lists reminders from users even before someone asks the question.
That said, people who are learning don't know their git from their django, and these people won't always know that they should be reading a glossary. The people who know are people who need a refresher.
Make sure you're in your game directory (and using the virtual environment with
pyenv) before running the following:
Someone who knows this already shouldn't be insulted by the reminder, but someone who doesn't could use the reinforcement.
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
Would you make social stats in the World of Darkness more powerful? If so, how?
Give them the teeth of physical stats, either by backing them up with concrete results (which Doors tries to do) or by bringing th consequences of physical actions into stark relief.
Since most people play RPGs to be Awesome, I prefer the Teeth result, unless you want to play in a universe of some considerable shadiness, a World of Darkness if you will, then more of the latter.
When you have enough to explain, I would love to see your conclusions in the development thread.
If you’re talking about WoD, the fiction and the theme and setting descriptions often do not match. It’s the job of the game lead to make sure all of this is consistent, but, well, Onyx Path is always under duress, and the original White Wolf was too stoned to care.
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
Yes.
Then this answers your question: Social and mental stats should be usable against other characters. (Maybe you've already said this amidst your responses; it's been a busy day on the board.) The question is then how to implement it, what to allow, and how to allow it.
WoD is such an "everything goes" kind of system that I don't envy anyone who's going to try.
