Posts made by Thenomain

@peasoupling

And that's where the game part of Role-Playing Game comes in. In fact I find MUDlikes to be the least immersive of these games, specifically because the code overrules the situation, but it's a fun part of a game. Full ANSI art is not immersive to me, but man it is fun.

@faraday and I were just discussing how code can easily push you out of immersion in situations where you have to stop what you're doing to remember the "IC" way to do things, when you have other methods already in your culture and the culture of most the people you're playing with. That isn't fun, and so it takes you out of the frame of mind that immersion is meant to bring you into.

So...yes. That.

--

edit, because of this thought:

Immeserive: Day/night cycles on games with vampires. But this was so annoying for so many people for so long that I personally celebrated the day that we stopped this. Now a scene is any time of day you want it to be. Someone might be able to tell that you're playing a vampire from that, but that information was never as secret as anyone wanted it to be. Now the onus is on the players to not abuse the knowledge, something supported by the current culture, and I hope always will.

Some day I will code or find the code from...LA?...where people could bunch together in small groups in any room, making their own gathering-type 'places'.

Immersion on Mu*s to me is the same as Immersion in tabletop play: If I think the character as something with its own life, the world as something with consistent rules even if they're different from reality, if I can imagine the game as existing in its own right.

The more someone tries to push the "IC is the only thing that matters", the less immersed I am. I do not forget that I'm in front of a computer screen reading text. The more a game tries to tell me to ignore this, the less immersed I get, a Role-Play Uncanny Valley.

@kay said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

What do you guys think about grid descs that are non-static?

I.e changes depending on the time of day and/or season and/or weather, assuming that is part of the game code?

So much that I made a very extensive ictime() function that would report from weather to moon phase and visibility. It started as "IC Time" and ended up being "IC Conditions". This way, it's trivial for anyone to code whatever description changes they want.

Or has the occasional automatic @emit like 'A cold breeze whispers through the alleyway.' or 'Something splashes in the water amidst the reeds.' or the like.

It may have changed, but people started loving flavor emits, but came to hate them. Do it for the flavor, but realize that you may be reversing it.

A switch whether or not someone see it would be interesting, but then you'd end up with people reacting to things you don't see. Make it all or nothing.

@tyche said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Origins Game Fair event registration. How can you screw this up 4 years in a row?

I think you're being considerate if you're only blaming the last four years.

The new low bar for GAMA to do better than is: Will the line for early registration pickup be 2 hours long again?

Or: Will the executive of Origins once again decree that you cannot get your money back for canceled events?

If I didn't live here, there would be absolutely no question if I'd rather go to Origins or GenCon. Origins is absolutely the Uber of the con scene: Bigger than it should be considering the way they treat the workers and also the customers.

@thatguythere said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@faraday
I would argue that public apologies are not really constructive either, not commenting on this one since I don't know the principles but the vast majority of them are propaganda not motivated by actual contrition.

I think there’s a difference between “not constructive” and “hostile”, which is why the forum is mostly constructive. It has a better ring to it than “non-hostile”, though the latter is more technically accurate about the purpose.

Vault Girl was not hostile. Hell, she’s one of the least hostile people in that thread. I’m 100% with @saosmash: You can dissent without being a dick about it, and this is what should be done on those forums. If they can’t handle that, it’s they, not the original poster, who should be censured.

If you (general you) can’t manage that, start a Hog Pit thread: Vault Girl is a dirty whore and here’s why. Mind you, we all get to laugh at you (fictional straw man you) when your evidence turns out to be brazen false-faced lies.

Incidentally, I do not believe anyone on this forum is a dirty whore. I’m sure any whores on Soapbox are clean and respectable.

(Call me.)

@kay

You don’t have to make it big, but make it FEEL big. Use big terms, describe how that area not just looks but what it evokes.

I absolutely adored Hanuted Memory’s grid, which was mostly four blocks per room, because it felt right, because the grid creator was intimately familiar with Vienna and also a decent writer. Somehow I never was confused where in the grid I was, probably because the map and naming convention helped too.

Did You Know () that Fallout 1 and 2 were designed to be beatable without combat? Someone managed to take Bethesda saying that it was impossible to design a Fallout game without combat and managed a no-kill run in FO4. (He had to trick NPCs into killing each other a few times.)

And Now You Know. Yo Joe.

The purpose of this post was to let these people design the game they want to run, it to tell them what is or isn’t going to work. I can no longer tell how many times we were wrong.

Save Scumming: A gamer’s friend.

@arkandel said in Humble Bundle: Digital Ocean Credit:

@ixokai said in Humble Bundle: Digital Ocean Credit:

git GUI

Heresy.

Witches have been burned for less.

Dude, I've been coding MU* code for over a decade and that git-shit be cray.

(man git-shit, I dare you.)

@ostheim said in What is your turning point?:

1. Don't be weird.

Welp, there goes most of us.

2. Have a good sense of humor.

I'm already sensing conflicting statements.

And just in case: I know what you meant but I was trying to be funny. I guess I should rule out #2 for me too.

I swear, Beat Saber is the Force Sensitivity detector that we didn't know we needed.

@thatguythere said in Good or New Movies Review:

first world rural

So...Trump rallies? GPS-driven tractors? Corporations suing independent farmers for GMO use because they managed to convince the courts to overlook how pollination works?

Or maybe utopian rural.

@mr-johnson said in Best Superhero System for a Mush?:

A system with concrete rules to balance out powers so it's not nearly as much a free for all where Superman, or batman will always be the best at everything forever. A system that manages this while not being so complex as to require months or years to learn, yet not as simplistic as Fate.

Mutants & Masterminds is popular though I personally detest its hidden consequences and its complexity.

Mutant City Blues is pretty outstanding in giving superhero powers a cause/effect matrix, but you're probably also not looking for something based on Gumshoe. This would probably be better suited to being tweaked for a "The Bright" RPG.

Wild Talents, though the use of various "flavors" of dice can be pretty difficult to maintain. If I recall, it's the standard ORE with 4 extra types of dice. (My favorite: Is always a 10. Why would you not want this die? Rocket launcher to a knife fight, that's why.) Also pretty heavy in the philosophical end of the spectrum, but would almost certainly be the system I'd use if I wanted to play a Watchmen game.

I'll settle on Savage Worlds with @ZombieGenesis, mostly because of its GURPS-like nature and relative ease of understanding and implementation.

@admiral

Death From Above, an insanely dangerous Mech maneuver where you drop your Mech onto another. A good way to lose leg structure.

I’ve not been paying too much attention to armor and weapon damage, but you only need to see it in action once to know how terrible and terrifying it can be.

Harry Potter, but where Voldemort is Pinhead.

@coin

The Tick’s punch has a SKILL of 20 but a PRECISION of d2.

Hitting a mook is Difficulty 5, making his Skill Overflow 15. He rolls a Precision of 1 on 1d2, so while he still hits because Difficulty 0, but he has 15 points of Too Successful to deal with on the precision failure.

You are only Too Successful when your Difficulty is 0 but you fail a Precision roll.

The building is toast.

Arthur has a fly SKILL of 5 and a PRECISION of d8.

He’s getting shot at by The Beehive’s beehive-hairdo canon bee gun. Difficulty is 6, minus 5 makes it 1. Arthur rolls a 1, but simply fails and has to make a crash landing in the middle of a sting barrage.

Yeah, I can go with this. If the lack of critical failure bothers anyone, make it the difference between the Difficulty and the roll.

@packrat

I finally figured out what DFA stands for in my mech summary.

Sheesh.

@roz

Must be me, then, but I know I’m not alone on this.

Role...play?

I...think I remember what that’s like.

I try not to get too attached to anyone as RP partners, because it never works as well as you or perhaps they are hoping. An absolute death knell is someone inviting you to play on a game they like; what they are almost never doing is inviting you to play with them.

It has gone well for me a few times, and I’ve never broken up friendships over it, but it’s either going to happen organically or it’s not going to happen.

This is fine, by the way. We’re here to waste time and enjoy the company of others in a theme and setting that we like.