Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

A quick blurb on what posing is and how to do it. The various commands (@emit, etc.) and what the norm writing style in play is (third-person, present-tense).

@sockmonkey said in Good TV:

I know I am really late to this party but OMG DID ANYONE ELSE WATCH THE LEFTOVERS?! I just slammed through all three seasons and Carrie Coon is amazing and I love her and she should be in everything. Like, she was great in the third season of Fargo (it's just a pity that the third season of Fargo simply wasn't as good as the first two -- not that that was on her) but she was transcendent as Nora Durst.

I WAS NOT grooving with the first season, but stuck with it because I'd really enjoyed the book. Then I quit. Got back on it after the third season wrapped and there was so much critical hype about how gr8 it was, though.

Ended up digging it a LOT. Carrie Coon is amazing and always was, even during the first season that I Was Not Into. Shame she never got an Emmy for that performance.

@tanyuu said in The Death Of Telnet: Is It Time To Face The Music?:

I honestly think that MU* s could offer something new to RPers who are looking for something lightweight, especially on tablets and phones. It doesn't need constant attention, it doesn't need a specific console or computer, and/or your internet access is limited or spotty, MU* s are great. Telnet seems to connect okay, but I've never tried to stretch it beyond 'connecting in to chat while cooking'.

I've always wondered how you'd go about making phone RP better, and I'm not sure I have an answer for it. I always find it torturous when I have to interact with a MU that way, and I never feel like it's the fault of the client (there are some perfectly fine ones out there). I just don't enjoy playing without a full keyboard. Maybe people who text more than I do have a different take on the experience, though.

@ashen-shugar said in Hobby-related Resolutions/Goals for the coming year... ?:

Got a ton of green coffee beans for Christmas.

Oh man, I want to do this one of these days. Maybe in 2019, when the disposable income is higher. Roasting my own coffee is part of The Dream.

I think over-populated games are a 'good' problem to have, if nothing else, and the possibility of such will hopefully be a nail in the coffin of 'THE HOBBY IS DYING OH WOE' posts. Maybe? Possibly? Please?

@moonman
I mean, we all still MU for a reason beyond just inertia. I've yet to find anything better for persistent-world, real-time RP. If I could've migrated to Gdocs or Roll20 ages ago, I would've done it, but they aren't as good a platform for it. If anyone's arguing the contrary of that, I haven't read it.

My own view of the argument, and the position I take in it is, the way we RP is unnecessarily archaic due to MUSH code's limitations and could be vastly improved and made more user-friendly.

What I wanna resolve to do is poke my head into more gaming stuff IRL. There are a handful of places where I live that do board game nights that I'd like to try.

You can also give people extra Luck points, and in a situation where characters COULD die in +combat based on conditions the GM lays out, those become pretty valuable.

@sg
If run as a TGG-style meat-grinder (both emphasis on soft RP outside of combat and ruthless enforcement of 'KO with no luck points is death' in combat? I would play the fuck out of that. And I think it's as perfectly suited for FS3 as a setting can be, really.

@shelbeast said in Mass Effect MU*?:

So, i've never seen/played with FS3. I hear about it a lot. It seems like it's really ONLY good for firearm combat. I've heard that it doesn't do melee well. It doesn't do magic. It doesn't do this or that.

I think it does melee (and small vehicle combat) decently enough for modern or futuristic settings. What it's not made to handle is feudal/fantasy combat (swords and horses and stuff). There are hacks out there that try, with varying degrees of success.

@ganymede
It would work for some things without much tweaking. On X-Factor, I played a pyrotechnic whose fire powers were approximated with a custom weapon @tat made up for me in about 20 minutes after chargen. That's directly comparable to a tech power like incinerate, and I think you could manage an OK approximation of the effects of damage-causing powers like Warp and Slam. Something like Statis is probably a combat/suppress thing. It'd take some finesse with some of the others, but it's not like every type of gun is coded in FS3. You can do a decent amount with modifiers the GM does during combat/good ole fashioned posing.

@sparks
For a long time I was REALLY hoping Roll20 would improve its interface for text-based RP/persistent world RP, and become a viable alternative. It's doing something different and not really right for that, though, but I'd have been ALL the fuck over that if it had gotten there.

There are plenty of other kinds of text-based players out there who will defend their format as "the one true writerly way" (the levels of elitism in journal RP, my God) and would say MUSHes are still too gamey/that the real-time format reduces quality of composition. I don't agree, and prefer this type of play because of the way it makes me write/interact with other players, but this is far from the only place you'll find "We write the bestest."

I mean, you can alias things. I'm not a programmer, so maybe I underestimate the simplicity of this,but. Ares, and Evennia from my experience on Arx, alias a lot of MUSH commands even if you don't technically need to slap the + or @ or whatever in front of things to make them work, and even if MUX/MMO-like commands also work. I've seen MOOs that aliased MUSH-like commands to try and expand their audience.

Idk, man. The games I play on now are an Ares-based game and an Evennia-based game, so maybe I'm under-estimating how hard the transition is, but I know that when I have to slap a '+' in front of something I've gotten used to working without it, it seems silly, and also seems like a pretty basic hurdle to overcome.

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Edited to add: Think of how different MU rp in a scene would be if we saw a typing indicator for someone that was posing.

One of my favorite Ares features is that you can hit a command and see how long it's been since everyone in a room has posed (not idle times, actual time-since posed). It is a fine piece of social engineering I would love to see spread.

@rnmissionrun said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The population of Arx suggests that maybe times have changed and people are open to new ideas. Time will tell.

Arx is also pulling from other types of games like RPIs, and sort of combining audiences. @roz has mentioned the Tumblr RPers who've come to Transformers: Lost Light. I don't think it's just about getting the (fairly small) population of MUers to try new things, though that's part of it. I think it's about making games that have appeal beyond the MUSH community, which stripping away the archaic commands and using programming languages people might encounter in other kinds of games (or in their RL jobs) is part of htat.

While I don't have time to code a MU, I can imagine a gamer who works in coding RL finding an Evennia game or Ares game a LOT more appealing to play with in their spare time.

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Yeah, I don't mean this as a slam on WoD at all, but it seems to me that a core reason for its popularity is the already existing softcode that can be plugged into it. It's significantly easier to set up a sandbox and get going there than anywhere else, along with a great many people familiar with it that are willing to pitch in.

Yeah, I'm reading this 'good games differ' line and am just baffled, given the world we all exist in. We've been getting by on plug-and-play code in large part for decades. I cannot fathom how better plug-and-play systems will be anything but a positive and open up the market for people who wouldn't have otherwise to run a good game.

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

And what I find kind of amazing about this, is how ill-suited and often semi-broken for real-time, text-based RP a lot of these formats are (I've read Facebook RP, man. I have read it and shall never forget). But people muddle through because life finds a way, to quote Jurassic Park. I think part of the reason Arx is so - comparatively - explosively popular is because it's found a way to hook some of this audience into a MU-like format, which is MUCH better for this kind of RP in so many ways. Once you get players into this format, its positives for what we do become clear. It's an indication of what's possible, to me, not an anomaly (and it displays the problems of scale when you manage to tap this audience, but that's another conversation).

@apos said in Alternative Formats to MU:

Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs.

This is why my eyes glaze over whenever people talk about how "the hobby is dying." There's TONS of text-based RP, it's just in places most of us don't interact/acknowledge on this board. Like, RPI MUDs aren't much different than MUSHes, but that's still a very different audience. Once you get into stuff like Dreamwidth journals or Tumblr or whatever...people be RPing. If every PennMUSH game imploded tomorrow, I could go find a place to text-based RP. I like MUSHes because of the immediacy they provide and the way they create a persistent, shared world, but I can imagine that being created another way.

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I use separate apps for Spotify and Slack and other such programs whenever possible, and I honestly don't view this as that different than using a MU client. I just think it's a better user experience.

The main difference IMHO is that those apps are easy to use. A MUSH client just isn't. It's like a DOS shell.

Oh, yeah, I'm not arguing that telnet is great. I'd be happy enough to see it gone if something better rose to replace it (I think the web portal is, right now, on its way to being a viable wiki replacement, which isn't something I could've imagined a year ago). But I think that's where some of the resistance to a web-based game comes from (I mean, there are also those people who just love SimpleMU, but I'm not so much dealing with them), and I felt like the argument for the experience a dedicated client provides was getting subsumed in that. What I think people picture is something you HAVE to play in a browser tab, when it probably could be something different that provides a comparable focus/features.