Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

Make sure you've got the "Spawn To" box checked to actually send it somewhere. If you just Omit From Display, stuff will just disappear without going anywhere (which would be one way to ignore someone I guess, heh).

@Gingerlily said:

Also I swear I read a hard copy library book about MUDs in specific, but it couldn't have been the Richard Bartle because that wasn't out until early 2000s so WHAT DID I READ, I still wonder.

I feel like these things were part of academic discussion back in those days, though I never read about them in an actual text book. But my freshman year computer science teacher in my first year of uni, in 2000, did a whole day on chat interfaces and talked about MUDs in some detail. Universities were still a natural pipeline into these kinds of games (I didn't do much MU*ing in the computer lab but I knew people who did), so I guess it's not surprisingly they were Things some teachers knew about as well as students.

@Gingerlily said:

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:
I finally finished SoA. That was a long binge. A painful one at the end. I think I might have gotten more out of it in a non-binge, watching it weekly over years. All together like that the last seasons are just a -world of pain- -for everyone- that -goes on and on-. So I am in agreement with you. I think the last two seasons definitely could have been one season and still handled the major things that needed to happen. Also that side non-Hamlet-allegorical characters just SUFFERED ALL THE PAIN for no apparent reason. If there is a moral to this story message received I will not be joining any outlaw motorcycle gangs. It's a bad plan.

It was hard to watch the last season of "Sons" even weekly, because of all those extra-long episodes. And because I'd inevitably fall a couple weeks behind and do two or three at a time, and I'd want to reach through the TV and strangle an editor. I suspect I'll like it more upon rewatch. Gemma is still an awesome character and it makes me sad Katey Sagal never got an Emmy for that role. The second season in particular is still one of my favorites.

THE WIRE IS AWESOME. Last season isn't as good as the first four, but it only suffers by comparison. It was all filmed on location in Baltimore and the head writers were both long-time residents, but it's definitely Baltimore As American City Metaphor.

@Coin said:

@Roz Damn. I wish SimpleMU had that kind of organization.

Yeah, same, it looks a lot cleaner than the tabs. Might be worth bothering the Potato developer about as an option.

See, I couldn't deal with a lack of spawn windows at this point. The only thing I use them for are channels, but I'm at a point where channel spam in my RP window drives me crazy and I inevitably lose/miss things if they're all on the same screen. I know some people keep an alt logged for the sole purpose of being on channels while their other char is RPing, but I alt pretty sparingly.

What I'd really like is some way to auto-post in-game +bbposts to a wiki feed, but that might require more work than it's worth.

I find forums to be a pain in the ass to search and archive information, though they're great for ongoing conversation and updates.

Both seems preferable and I've seen plenty of games that have wikis and an integrated forum (either using the wiki forum itself or another one linked).

I've also seen MU*s that were purely forum-based and the setup always struck me as more disorganized than it needed to be, but stuff is there. Somewhere.

Is there any way to get the Google search bar back?

I play on a pseudo-X-Men game that's using it now and I've liked the way they've customized things so far. http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/Main_Page I play a fire-starter with a customized blowtorch weapon. With stuff like that it's fairly easy (you can make a pretty wide variety of custom weapons), but a lot of powers are handled through +rolls.

@Apos said:

I'd be less concerned by twinks and more concerned with completely new players getting through CG, playing a month, then feeling 'cheated' later when they realize they could have designed their sheet a different way to save XP. In making a newbie friendly system I think that case is significantly more worrisome than random assholes (see @bored ).

You could also just let players re-spec after a month. I have asked to do this on an FS3 game before and it was no more complicated than resetting my sheet and going back through chargen (well maybe there were back-end complications, idk, but nobody freaked out about the idea).

@faraday said:

@bored said:

But they will. After 6 months playing, the master will have picked up all your rounded skills, and you will have gained only a fraction of their knowledge.

It's hard to argue without citing specific examples, but I haven't seen that phenomenon. But if true, I would suggest that's a case of the XP awards or costs needing to be adjusted, rather than a problem with chargen itself.

My assumption is @bored is either talking about Fifth World (which I never played personally so can't speak to, though I've heard stuff like this from friends of mine) or Game of Bones, which has a laissez-faire attitude toward stats in general that seemed like an intentional part of game culture.

In my experience it takes 2-3 months minimum to find a new job unless you've got something obvious lined up. So no reason not to keep looking discretely. If you stumble onto something, it's leverage if they do end up offering a promotion.

@Shayd said:

What I'm noticing here is what I suspected: most people on MUSoapbox appear to have discovered text-based games (at the latest) in the 1990s-2000s. Have any of you discovered them after 2010, or do you know anyone who has?

A buddy of mine did (I think BSG Kharon might've been his first game, and that was back in 2009-ish). I ran into a 19-year-old this year who was new to MU*ing, which tickled me. I think the hobby's main problem now is that there are fewer gateways to randomly stumble onto it.

@Tez said:

One thing I foresee as a potential problem (for us, anyway, if we switched systems, and I can already imagine @Roz twitching at the idea) is the rate of diminishing returns at high numbers of dice making it difficult to create an NPC that is a real challenge for players. I'm still trying to find the right balance on this with the old version of FS3 that we're using.

This has always been something I struggled with as well, even back in the BSG game dark ages. It was really easy to over-power PCs with mid-level stats without meaning to, but also tricky to set up a challenging NPC that both wouldn't get one-hit killed but also wasn't invincible.

Any major differences in how this works in/with +combat versus the old system?

I find the traits I have IRL are just magnified online, for better and worse. At least in terms of people I know well and chat with regularly. We all have aspects of ourselves we try to project in certain situations, both online and in the meat world, so I don't assume I 'know' people who I only talk with passingly online or chat with a couple times a week at work. But after enough exposure to someone, I think they are what they are.

I started on MUDs, after doing a random online search for "games" on my parent's AOL dial-up, back in the day. They were labeled "RP MUDs" but they weren't the kind where people actually RP'd. Mostly people TS'd awkwardly (since emits were really limited) and got 'drunk' at the bars on the grid off coded alcohol. I did enjoy killing random monsters, though, and it kind of introduced me to the concept of text-based games.

I was into fantasy novels in high school (I was about 17 when I started doing this) and searched a lot of the early fandom stuff that existed in 1999, so between that and MUDing I found MUSHes pretty quickly. My first was the WoT place, Tales of Ta'Veren, which was a really good experience for a newbie. I played on raw telnet for like 2 years (and this was back in like 2000, when I was on awful dial-up Internet anyway) before downloading a client and also was 17, so I was pretty terrible when I started, but the playerbase there was nice enough and I learned by watching better RPers.

So the Giant Soulless MegaCorp I work for is relocating my position to another office that (shockingly) will end up being closer to where I live. In a decision that positively impacts my life, purely by accident. So I'll be within pretty easy biking distance of work starting next month.

I'd like to at least try this. I've been toying with the idea of buying a bike for awhile, for health reasons, and this seems like as good a time as any.

Does anybody who bikes regularly have advice on what kind to get? The Internet tells me there's a huge range of choices and price ranges.

This would be mainly for city commuting/tooling around, but I'm within driving distance of some decent desert trails where I go hiking now and might in theory want to bike out there at some point in my life.

@SG said:

Unless you're into House of Commons Rp, i don't see rival characters like this interacting all that much. Even thought Harper and Trudeau shared the same barber, I don't imagine they met up that often for what we'd call RPs type scenes.

There are actually lots of cases of political rivals in different parties who have quite interesting relationships outside work (Reagan and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill are the most prominent example I can think of off the top of my head, but this isn't even uncommon or strange, much as present rhetoric would like to suggest). That's also tangential, so.

I'm really tempted to upgrade to a Surge once I've got some spare change laying around. I've got a Charge now, which is still bulky to sleep in, but I've gotten used to it.