@mr-johnson
I honestly don't think a playable prologue is a terrible thing, or that staffers can't have some kind of vision for their stories. They shouldn't be totally pre-planned, but I also think plots with NO direction tend to be frustrating in their own way. Like, don't let one terrible PRP run by someone who's clearly a moron make you think a loose outline is some kind of source of evil.
@tinuviel said in A New Star Wars game? (Legends of The Old Republic (Name pending)):
@thenomain You know, a game set in the Star Wars universe using the TGG methodology wouldn't be a bad idea.
Eh, I feel like it always gets under-played what a small MU TGG was, even at its height. Like, it can work and I personally enjoy that kind of play a lot, but it's going to be more niche than @Mr-Johnson is maybe going for. I think the Old Republic is a good setting for a standard MUSH, though it'd also work for something more experimental.
@mr-johnson
Seriously, whatever comes of this, major props to you for taking an idea and running with it. Exciting!
I am posting to voice general interest in an Old Republic Star Wars game that does not use feature characters or marry itself overmuch to the movie plots!
Another major advantage of the Old Republic as a setting, to me, is that you don't have to contort yourself to allow players to play Force users, or limit them to a small segment of players.
This is my primary issue with travel wait times, as @Lotherio puts it. I'm perfectly happy to RP a month of road adventures with an active group (I have done voluntary road trips on games with no enforced travel and they're fun). But when everyone else in your ship/party is inactive and you're cut off from the rest of the game for a week, what do you do?
@sg said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
I too hate staring at a timer when I'm in hyperspace, it sucks, but I think the fault is with staff for making the setting for RP galaxy wide instead of an area of space where this wouldn't be an problem. I'm in the camp that a star wars mush should take place in a single sector at maximum to get rid of this issue.
I'd love to play a Star Wars MU or Firefly MU that was centralized around a single world, with adventures happening more episodically outside it and revolving around it as the main setting (again, this is a game the people interested in sim space travel probably wouldn't love, but, different audiences). I do think it'd make a game in terms of RP/story, though, and I'm kind of surprised it's not tried more often.
@pyrephox said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
I want some sort of acknowledgement of travel times involved that cuts down on the teleportation issue (unless you actually have teleporters), but I don't know that it needs to be isolation in a grid room. These days, I'm more leaning towards some sort of off-screen time resource that can be spent to do off-screen actions, /including/ travel time.
I like this a lot, for my own inclinations as someone who's not really on a game to play a travel sim but does want some way to approximate the sense of scale/challenge of a big expedition.
Thing is, there's a segment of players who really do like playing with flying sims and stuff like h-space. It's a different audience than me, just like the audience who loves crafting is a different one than me, but it's out there.
My own question is, whether a game designer can serve one audience while not alienating the other, and I'm not really sure that's possible. Unlike crafting, there's really no way to ignore that you're spread out on a giant grid of multiple planets that take days to travel to. Not that a game designer has to serve both audiences, mind. Ideally there are lots of niche games that serve lots of types of players. I don't know that the giant grid game can work long-term without a very large playerbase, though.
None of the non-Blood of Dragons A Song of Ice and Fire MUs have ever been bothered by GRRM to my knowledge. The only 'bothering' that seemed to take place was Nymeria saying nasty things about them on her social media platforms, which isn't so much 'bother' as 'kind of funny.'
The guy has written statements that he doesn't like fan fiction and if game-runners feel like they want to honor that, that's one thing, but unless you try and make money off this stuff, the lawyers circling the wagons is 99% not a concern.
@ominous said in Favorite Minigames:
So we have Kentucky and Wisconsin to thank for MU*s.
This makes as much sense as anything.
I've looked at AoA but a friend who plays there described it as "sandboxey," with not a lot of GM-driven plotting, which tends to be a not for me kind of thing. It DID seem very active, though.
Yeah, the thing I liked about it was that it never felt compulsory, but you could in theory find things to use for flavor in RP. Nobody starved because they weren't +hunting and you could still run scavenging scenes/missions (which weren't common, but plots in general weren't common when I was there, so it's a flaw in ourselves and not our stars/code kind of thing).
@tek said in Favorite Minigames:
No Return was a shitshow, but I adored their scavenge/hunting system to pieces.
At a certain point I wanted them to take the stupid Cheese Hat you could get out of the generator, but I did really like this piece of code, and I think it actually could've helped a lot with RP immersion on a different kind of game. No Return was, in general, quite well-coded.
I consider myself pretty mini-game agnostic. I'm not a person who gets much out of MMOs, and I feel like my ambivalence for MU mini-games comes from the same place. I tend to go to single-player games to enjoy grind (Stardew Valley 4 life) but on games where there's a need to be social it feels focus-splitting in a way that ends up kind of stressing me out. I'm not the type of player who will ever be drawn to an RP game because of its equipment system or its crafting system, and they're things I begin to resent if they're necessary to push through to actually go out and RP (my hate-on for stuff like eating/drinking code lives here). This is a personality thing, though. The players who love this stuff LOVE it and it doesn't seem to make them less engaged in actual RP. Different strokes (seriously, though, don't try to make me love crafting).
That said, if they're truly optional and just side pieces, I have no hate and will play with them and enjoy them sometimes. I think coded poker/pool/darts actually can spur RP in fun little ways, even if they are just toys, the same way having a dice system where players can dick around with random rolls among themselves can lead to fun and unexpected RP. I also think grid exploration games (where you can discover secret rooms or world lore by reading descs carefully) can be very immersive, though you have to be careful that they don't take away from the grid being easy to navigate and functional.
I don't really view combat as a 'mini-game' in the way I think @Apostate is talking about. On The Greatest Generation, for example, it required a GM to run and was very much central to the major-game. It can be turned into a mini-game: the sparring on Arx that players can run amongst themselves is a mini-game I end up playing quite a bit and has led to some cool scenes/meetings with new PCs.
ETA: I'd actually be curious what people think constitutes a mini-game. Like, the @clue system on Arx I consider a vital part of the game in terms of interaction with the metaplot and story. Same with h-space on the games that use it for travel (and the combat on something like TGG). These were things that, if you aren't into them, they aren't something you can really avoid. Whereas, not being into crafting has usually been pretty shrughands for me.
The most important thing I look for in someone I want to RP relationship stuff with is...is this person OOCly chill? I've been a lot happier in my since I just NOPED out of relationship stuff with players where the answer was no.
Far as IC marriage goes, I love my shipper RP but haven't gotten my chars married a lot. It rarely feels necessary or organic to me, and I tend to slot it in as an epilogue to where certain relationships end up (or not) when I fade out an alt. I did marry off my character on the GoT MU Steel and Stone, which was life-ruining in some fun dramatic ways. And my alt on Arx, which so far has not ruined her life at all, and just seemed like the natural place to take a long-term thing.
@wolfs
Cuendillar still technically exists? Damn. I thought it'd gone the way of dinosaurs years ago.
The sad thing is, I feel like there was a time when, had it just closed, players there might've picked up the torch and started a new thing. Ah well. Maybe something will come of this discussion.
@surreality
Oh, yeah, this person is making the exact kind of GAMES ARE WRONG BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT THIS argument that I think is a major problem with a lot of approaches to this hobby. That said, I do think the major reasons certain styles of gameplay are persistent across certain codebases are culture ones, and we should own that and acknowledge that it's kind of dumb, and that it's probably harmful for it to persist as stuff like Evennia and Ares develop other ways of doing stuff. Like, my big fear is that people see Arx and say 'Oh, I don't like this, I never want to play an Evennia game' or see BSU and say, 'Oh, I don't like FS3, I'm not interested in developing anything for Ares.'
Like, I think it's been said a few times on this very board that MOO and MUCK are WAY saner to code in than the MUSH/MUX variants, but they never caught on with this audience because fear of objects/fear of furries, respectively.
@surreality said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:
@nightshade ...because maybe you're looking for something more like an RPI or a MOO, which is not the MUSH/MUX hobby's fault.
I mean, this person's being ultra abrasive and anti-sensible and I'm not really bothering to read his posts, so it's not what I'm responding to per se.
That said, I think viewing codebases as proxies for game experience/culture actually is one of the problems in this hobby. There are MOOs that are entirely MUSH-like, beyond the code base. There's also no reason an MUSH or MUX can't be made to be heavily object/code-oriented (the TGG combat code is my go-to example of this, just due to my own experience).
My hope is that Ares and Evennia as less obscure coding platforms will enable people to make more of all kinds of games, but I fear the attitude of 'oh, it's an X Codebase game, not for me' will persist there as well.