Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@aria
Post your reaction to The Good Place finale.

It's my current Best Thing and the second season's even better, tho not all up anywhere expect On Demand right now.

@the-sands said in MU* Activity Survey 2018 - DRAFT:

@faraday (Raw) Data itself is not really subjective.

I don't think this is true, especially in regard to polling. How you frame questions and what questions you include, has a huge impact on the data you get. We also aren't really talking raw data, here, we're talking a survey with voluntary participation, which in itself already does things to your data set that you need to take into account. I DO think stuff like this is useful, mind you. But it's not raw data on MU community activity. Stuff like the mudstats.com activity graphs are, and I still love looking at those tables because I enjoy data nerding and think it's useful, but that site doesn't seem to add or delete games with any regularity, alas.

@auspice said in CrystalMUSH:

It's just lately I've had a few people comment to me how they want a MU* where there is some level of code like that, but also social RP... without being a MUD. That's why I keep going back to hmm. Maybe it's time to bring it back.

My question is what's the difference in it being a "MUD," if what you're mainly looking for are puzzles and exploration? Limits on @emits would be the only thing I can think of, and idk who common those are on these styles of games. I know that's not true of all RPIs.

Like I do think there's an audience that might want to mess around with something like this, who do play similar MUDs, but wouldn't try a "MUSH."

@aria
The WORLD needs a Mia.

@sockmonkey
Michael B Jordan has had an amazeballs career, but he'll always be Wallace to me.

@quinn said in Stranger Than Fiction MUX:

A couple people said their MO is to open a game for like 6 months, get bored, and open another one. I think Lantern Hill was one? I've definitely never played on one of their other games, so someone else will have to confirm.

This shit honestly baffles me. Just...run a private game if this is what you want to do. There's nothing wrong with that, you'll take zero flack for it, it's a far more appropriate way to do some types of campaigns. Why open a public game when you don't actually want to run one?

@auspice said in 'The Magicians' mechanics with FS3:

Additionally, you'd need a +weather system for what you have in mind that simply doesn't exist. One that tracks weather and astronomical systems both, displaying them to PCs. Furthest I've seen is weather + moon phases.

2nd Edit: Oh, don't forget tides. You'd need those, too.

This would actually be really cool if someone had the time and inclination to code it up. Agreed it's not what FS3 is built for, though.

@faraday
Oh, yeah, that's entirely fair, and I'm never a fan of rules that are specifically designed to work around bad or stupid behavior that players just shouldn't engage in in the first place. I do think it has other utility (specifically if there's a notification feature, which only the participants would want to get), but I can certainly understand the cost/benefit analysis not working out for something like it.

@faraday
In my experience, unfortunately, you'll get more complaints and bad feelings about "exclusion" if a private event is posted publicly where everyone can see, than you will if who can see it is locked.

Which sucks and is another player-behavior problems, rather than a tool problem, but it does make me hesitant to post smaller-scale stuff on a public events calendar.

@scissors said in Encouraging Proactive Players:

Granted, using +event for scheduling purposes makes things easier. +Events are well-suited to certain types of scenes, such as one-off "Monster-of-the-Week" scenes, or game-wide major plot scenes. For ongoing mini-plots and story lines, I think using +Events will only end up with frustrations for the ST.

You've just 'granted,' as if it were a side note, the main utility of +events.

I use them as a calendar. I assure you, it's a hell of a lot better than wading through +mails and hoping everyone has their WhenIsGood set to the right timezone or trying to set something in a Google calendar that nobody checks or or or or or...

I mean what's your alternative for this? I feel like this is blaming a tool when the actual problem is player behavior that stems from a lot of things, lemminging to +events being only a rather small part of it.

I do wish every game allowed private as well as public +events. This feature is pretty sweet! As are notifications an hour or a half hour before something you're supposed to be at is going to start.

@sockmonkey
Yeah, they're only doing 13 episodes a season. Which sucks in a way because I WANT MORE, but I'm also sure that it's how the show's been able to keep up the quality that it's achieved. So, I'll live.

And watch whatever episodes of The Good Place are up on Netflix/Hulu on a loop.

@rnmissionrun said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:

I have to say, not once in more than 20 years of playing on Star Trek MU*s have I ever had to explain to a player how a 'transporter' works, not even to players that have never actually watched Star Trek.

Same. I feel like there's a lot of over-complication going on in this thread. Maybe that's what players actually do on MU*s and should be accounted for by game-runners, but it's a still over-complication.

Also, I feel like there are a LOT of specifics in fantasy in terms of weapons, armor, economics, and social mores that are far more alien than what you normally encounter on a sci-fi game. Like, a phaser is a gun with a stun setting. That's, imo, all you need to say, go about your business. It's a matter of how much you're willing to hand-wave them and tolerate minor missteps, and I'm skeptical that fantasy players are more hand-wavey than sci-fi ones.

@thenomain
MAXIMUM DEREK

I've been reading this thread and sort of batting a lot of thoughts around about it without fully being able to pull them together. Because I think MUers can be incredibly cruel to eachother and we all have tales of really shitty things we've either seen or experienced first-hand (I can, off the top of my head, remember two cases of players faking their deaths for no better purpose than ginning up sympathy to escape IC consequences/fucking with people. Humans be messed up). But I also think this is a pool of gaming that is less cruel than the worst of what you see in other quasi-anonymous online gaming venues. I think the relatively small size of the player pool helps. You can't burn your bridges TOO much, or else you'll have nowhere to play very quickly. I also think there's a separation in text and the slower pace where you can keep things from becoming as intense as you might get in a medium where voice interaction and interaction through graphical platforms is more normal.

But I was listening to this podcast on (among other things) the promise of virtual reality today, and it pulled together some things that kind of connected with me on this.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier-interview

This guy had a lot of what I found to be really interesting thoughts on the toxicity of some online platforms, and he talked about VR as - at the moment - a place where there was promise for a better kind of interaction. And a large part of that promise was how personally-driven (rather than pack-mentality driven) the experience was when you assume an avatar that you've created and invested in. And you're interacting with the other avatars that other users have created and invested in, in that same singular way. The lack of monetization/advertising as a driving behavioral force was also put forward as something that sort of leveled out the way players relate to each other. It keeps the experience personal, even in a very unreal way, and doesn't allow you to as easily dehumanize the other players.

This might be too starry-eyed a view of VR (it's not a platform I have a ton of familiarity with) but I found it a really intriguing conversation and it pulled at some threads that I think are applicable to MUing as well at its best (and its worst people are still sometimes terrible, but that's the nature of people).

@scar said in RL Anger:

Only thing is, the communal bathroom (lights off) has been taken over not only by every makeup and beauty product known to man, but a full breakfast with steaming hot coffee. I’m talking every available surface space including the lip of the bathtub, toilet seat, countertop completely taken over.

This is far from the most annoying part but I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.

I am a different kind of human from the human in this story.

One of the things I liked about Second Pass (which I found in its last days, alas) was that it said explicitly in the news files 'The style for this game is third-person/present-tense.'

Just say it upfront and clearly so you don't get the journal and forum RPers dying on their hill of past-tense posing, and we'll all be happier. I get why newbs do it, it's only when it persists after months on the game that I start to grit my teeth at it.

@apu
I remember Bhagyamma

I have a lot of nostalgia for Gallipoli. WW1 is still my favorite, and it hit at the time I could be most involved OOCly in helping it along. Always been happy about how it came off (and how history gives you a natural end point to something).

@eubanana
War without end...

I look at the Twitter-style journals as something akin to how our respected American Founding Father's started newspapers specifically to trash each other. And any number of other historical cases you could name. Leaflets and letters as vehicles for gossip/quippy asides seems like one of the less fantastical things on the game (lack of printing presses aside, which strikes an odd note in my brain but I've accepted).

@wildbaboons
I will always upvote a Pirates of Darkwater reference. Represent!