Best posts made by WTFE

OK, it sounds like you've done at least a modicum of thought on it beyond "wouldn't it be cool if...?".

So here are my thoughts, welcome or otherwise.

First, one of my big beefs with RPGs in general stems from the ur-game, D&D. D&D stemmed from wargaming roots and it's so painfully obvious that it did to anybody who actually played those games back when D&D was being introduced. One of the things that stems from this background is the experience system.

The never-ending staircase of ever-increasing power has a direct ancestor in campaign wargames where units got better as they got more experience. The problem is that even in campaign wargames there were:

1. Upper bounds.
2. Typically an end to the process. (The campaign ended.)

This didn't happen in D&D games, so you wound up with that ever-increasing levels thing reaching literally godlike levels. (Original D&D had, IIRC, only six levels max … but this was one of the first things dropped as people played the game.)

The current shibboleth that this mimics the development of characters you see in the fictions it was based on is trivially observable bullshit. The stated sources of inspiration (Conan, the Grey Mouser stories, etc.) did not start off their stories with the heroes being incompetent nebbishes who could be defeated by a house cat half the time. The stories started with them being at least heroic and, perhaps, over the course of several novels/stories/whatever they would get a bit better. Most advances in the stories were advances of social construct, not powers and abilities. Conan didn't start off barely able to hold his sword and end off able to fight gods in the stories. Conan started off able to fight minor gods and ended off able to, you know, fight minor gods. But he started as an unregarded barbarian and ended as king.

(Note: I am emphatically not saying that there was no development of character abilities in these stories! I'm saying that the development was far less than a typical RPG character undergoes in the D&D-style RPG vein…which includes Storyteller.)

So my response to your (implied) question of "how do we control endless XP growth" is 无, the Chan (Zen) means of, essentially, unasking a badly-formulated question. The proper question isn't "how do we control XP so that we don't have huge imbalances of power?" it is rather "how do we manage player expectations so they don't seek this never-ending escalator of power?"

Some modern games handle this far better. An example of this would be @Thenomain's and and my go-to example: Fate (Core or Accelerated Edition—FC and FAE respectively in the future). These games have "milestones" that, when met, allow character sheets to change. (I'll use FAE for my examples because it's my favoured flavour of Fate, but FC's systems are pretty much identical, just more verbose.)

In FAE a "minor milestone" lets you choose one of (and only one of):

• Switch the ratings of any two "approaches" [read: skills].
• Rename one "aspect" [no real equivalent; think of it as redescribing facets of your character's social hooks or abilities] that isn’t your high concept.
• Exchange one "stunt" [read: D&D3+ feat, kinda/sorta] for a different stunt.
• Choose a new stunt.

Of these options the only one that increases your character's ability in any measurable way is the last one. And that's a relatively minor increase. The rest are about changing the character's focus, like your example of the guy who picked up a gun skill for a specific reason and then didn't really need it any longer would be renaming an aspect.

Then there are "significant milestones". In these you get to do any one of the minor milestone options plus you may do both of the following:

• If you have a severe "consequence" [long-term injury effect] that’s been around for at least two sessions, you can clear it.
• Raise the bonus of one approach by one.

Note that only one of these involves measurably improving a character. (The other restores a damaged character.)

Finally there are the "major milestones". In these you get to do a minor and significant milestone's options plus any or all of:

• Take an additional point of refresh, which you may immediately use to purchase a stunt if you wish. [Again no real equivalent; this is the rate at which you get back your used-up "fate points".]
• Rename your character’s "high concept" [effectively equivalent to a user-defined character class if you will].

And again only one of these two improves the character (and given the fate point economy of the game, it's a pretty decent improvement). The other merely redefines it.

Under the Fate-style "advancement" mechanism I personally think you have a far better model of character change than the D&D-based models that dominate RPGs. Fate itself is not necessarily a good fit for all genres (and most gamers, given how ludicrously conservative they tend to be!), but I think its advancement mechanism could be kit-bashed into other games in ways that make the power creep built into them less of a problem than they currently are for online play.

So, I had something made for me.

This is the single most expensive piece of "jewellery" I've ever owned.

It arrived today.

Thank you, @Glitch. It is genuinely appreciated.

@Griatch said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

It is the first time I hear that much vitriol against the install process so it's worth to consider.

This is because the typical reaction of people when faced with (to them) crap software is to not bother with it. You're not going to get feedback from the people who tried and gave up. It takes a special breed of asshole to tell you at length why he gave up on your "crap" software.

I'll second the recommendation for GURPS provided you really enjoy the single most incoherently and incompetently designed system of the '80s.

GURPS splat books can be a good read. GURPS itself is ... well, shit.

@VulgarKitten said:

Has anyone ever faked an orgasm IC? <.<

Usually when the sex bores me.

<insert long, drawn-out, painfully purple prose here that translates roughly to "Skank takes off one sock">

Boor watches the sock comes off, trembles briefly, then glances down at his crotch. "Wow, that was hot babe. Sorry 'bout the premature there. Catch you on the flip side.

Boor wanders off, cell phone out, calling up Linda's Escorts.

Can we build a second wall with me on the inside and all you insane fuckers in the Asylum on the other side of it?

@faraday said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

@WTFE said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

In the end I may finally implement the program's final version in a compiled language, but nothing beats a hosted interpreted language (or a language whose compile/link/load cycle is so fast it emulates one) for raw exploration of concept space.

I completely agree with you that this is MUSHcode's strength. And if that's your primary goal in your game and you're willing to learn MUSHcode to do so, then clearly the first-gen MUSH servers are for you.

Except you missed the part where I said that MUSHcode is a fucking horror of a language.

My issue with Evennia is that it is (correctly) predicated on the observable fact that MUSH servers are dying-to-dead technology barely being propped up by increasing cruft at all levels. (Some of the work people are putting into MUSH servers is incredibly creative, but it's gilding a turd in the end.) But Evennia is the other kind of turd: the overengineered mess. It solves, IMO, almost, but not quite, exactly the wrong problems and in the process of doing so removes one of the few virtues that MUSH servers have.

And it didn't need to.

For example, there are other embeddable languages out there that you can incorporate into a custom server that will bring you up out of the stone age. Off the top of my head I can cite Lua and Tcl as possible contenders (with Lua going more up the list because it's quite a bit more modern and popular a language). The choice of Python + Django + MySQL + <insert long list technologies here> with the full-blown methodology of semi-professional software development expectations is actively offputting for hobbyist-oriented pretendy fun-time games, IMO.

IMO an ideal MU* server replacement would:

1. Not be telnet based. Period. Supporting telnet as a deprecated legacy, sure, but the telnet ship has sailed. And foundered on shoals in the middle of the fucking Pacific. And then sunk to the bottom. All the telnet extensions that MUSHes and their clients have fitfully tried to incorporate over the years are more turd-gilding. A MU* server replacement should be where most people reside on the Innarwebtubes these days: the web (or mobile apps if you must).
2. Be a trivial installation. IDEALLY it should be a single-executable installation. "Copy this file into your PATH" or even better "run ./my_funky_server --install and stand back". (Don't believe this is possible? Take a gander at the Fossil SCM: full-fledged DSCM, web server, scriptable wiki, document server and quite a bit more ... and all in a single executable that is about 9MB on my system right now. This includes the baked-in SQL database…)
3. Support both in-game coding and out-of-game coding. There are some who want the shell+text-editor+RCS+… infrastructure and there are some who want the in-game immediacy. Why not support both? Hell, why not let people decide which tasks they want to perform where? Maybe game systems at one site are done in external modules while in-game gewgaws are coded inline. Perhaps even … <gasp!> let people move things from one domain to another (provided they have the privs, natch!). Let them tinker with things online, then export the tinkered items into the formal development environment for all the crunchy VCS, modularity, and other goodness.
4. As a furtherance of the previous, why not support multiple languages? Python for the plug-ins, say, while Lua is used in-game. Or any other pairing (or more!) of languages. Hell, publish a socket/RESTful interface specification and let anybody plug in any language that can talk sockets and/or HTTP (or WebSockets if you want to be hipster). Out of the box you support a small, carefully selected set of languages, but keep it wide open for extension.

But as @Griatch pointed out, the workflow for Ares/Evennia is nowhere near as onerous as the C example you cited. I logged in yesterday and someone reported a bug in the mail system. I fired up my SSH client, edited one file, typed reload and voila - the bug was fixed in about 2 minutes.

Now factor in debugging to find the problem. It's a lot easier to debug a system that gives you its guts at point of usage... (I go back to my use of Forth in embedded systems when exploring hardware, for example, or prototyping applications. Or often actually delivering them.)

@Ganymede: We did?

2000 posts is pretty sizable. I guess "motherfucking huge" is a judgement call, but … well … it qualifies for me at any rate. And when I consider that @Ghost has gone into the ignore pile three times in the past three months or so alone based on his utter stupidity, I'd say that the comparison to Bane is apt as well.

This latest blend of utter tone deafness with a joke, an ensuing non-apology (complete with attempt to again somehow turn it around to be @Cupcake's fault that he got called on his bullshit), and the whole "not deal with you" as if it were, in fact, @Cupcake being unreasonable here, so reeks of Bane-like behaviour that I'm perfectly comfortable with the comparison.

The only thing really missing from being Bane Mk. II is claims of saving MUSHing with vaporware.

Source code available here.

Sorry for my choice of "weird" programming languages but I haven't yet found a decent replacement for Rexx in general utility scripting yet. It's easy enough to read, though, that I'm sure it can be trivially ported to the more hipster-oriented languages.

build-usb.rx is a simple utility that you run by issuing rexx build-usb.rx (or its equivalent on whatever OS you happen to be using). It will connect to the Linux kernel USB database and will download its contents, parsing all available vendor ID and product ID codes. (It specifically only looks for VIDs and PIDs, not everything in the database). It generates the file USB.rx as output. This output file should be placed somewhere in your Rexx implementation's macro path. (For Regina on Linux that would be found in the REGINA_MACROS environment variable. Other Rexx implementations will have their own equivalents.) When that is in place you have a new (external) function available that will let you look up a VID or a VID,PID pair to get a string back formatted for easy parsing. You can read the opening comment at the link above for full details, but as an example:

parse value USB(4321, 8765) with 'VENDOR:' vendor '->' 'PRODUCT:' product
say vendor product

This snippet of code will print UNKNOWN because there is no '4321' VID. :

parse value USB('1a86', '7523') with 'VENDOR:' vendor '->' 'PRODUCT:' product
say vendor product

This code will print QinHeng Electronics HL-340 USB-Serial adapter.

Or the following short script will read the output from lsusb and print the vendors and products of everything on your USB bus (in Linux):

address system 'lsusb' with output fifo ''
do queued()
  parse pull 'Bus' . 'Device' . 'ID' vidpid .
  parse value vidpid with vid ':' pid .
  parse value USB(vid, pid) with 'VENDOR:' vendor '->' 'PRODUCT:' product
  say vendor product
end

(Yes, I'm aware that lsusb already prints that information. It's just an example of use, not an actually useful script!)

@ThugHeaven said:

@Luna Don't forget 15 and a lesbian too. Somebody should've drawn what one of those pcs would've looked like in real life.

The way most males write female descs, I picture a tree branch with basketballs stapled to it. (Why basketballs? Well, they are described as "perfectly spherical"...)

@Kanye-Qwest said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

I don't think there's anything wrong with the statement "Developing with Evennia requires you to know/learn Python".

There is definitely something VERY wrong with that statement: it's not true.

You must learn Python. You must learn the Python ecosystem with its myriad of tools to rein in its chaos. (Virtual environments, PIP, etc.) You have to set up a database IIRC. (I may be misremembering here; it's been ages since I looked at Evennia.) And now, apparently, you have to know Git (or Mercurial because, you know, Python).

I am by no means a defender of MUSHcode. "A fucking horror" is not a term of endearment. But even despite the fucking horror, MUSHes are far friendlier "out of the box" experiences than massively over-engineered systems like Evennia.

(I should probably put "scare quotes" around the "engineered" portion because human/machine interface is part of proper engineering.)

Now, again, if the target market is professional programmers who want a professional (where "professional" is defined as "senselessly complicated for no good reason: cf. enterprise") development environment for their pretendy-fun-time-text-game hobby, then Evennia probably hits close to a sweet spot.

If, however, the market is broader and includes hobbyists it has, IMO, fallen far short of what's needed to appeal there.

@Ganymede said in RL Anger:

If you want to put him on your Ignore list, that's fine. You've your reasons. But I hope you can agree with me that calling him Bane is unwarranted. Man, that's like calling someone VASpider: you reserve those curses for the people to whom they refer.

OK, calling him Bane was out of order. BigBad?

And sure, @Meg, we could have that debate some other place, some other time. But I guess my point was, and still is, that he mea-culpa'd out of the box.

No. He did the half-assed-mea-culpa-but-really-te-culpa out of the box. And not for the first time.

Ghost isn't stupid…

Nor was, behaviour to the contrary, Bane. Unless you go by Gump formula, in which case both are pretty fucking stupid.

…and he certainly did not come off as defensive until someone accused him of specifically targeting Cupcake.

He started getting defensive the moment @Cupcake called him on his tin-earred response. Note: it wasn't until @Cupcake called him on it that he turned on his "I'm a complete asshole" mode. There's a pattern here. A pattern that now several people have commented on. I wasn't even the first (nor the last).

Frankly, if someone accused me of deliberately picking on someone when I honestly didn't mean to, even I would get a bit defensive. I'll own up to being my own kind of special.

Except … I linked to 2000 posts of history. There really is a trend of him going after @Cupcake for no visibly apparent reason. I mean I get it, they have history together. I'd be gunning after a few people from my history (Custodius, say) and it would make me look utterly fucking insane when I did. If there isn't a rule about me jumping in with the Marrach story every time Custodius is mentioned in the drinking game there should be. (There isn't. I should know. I wrote the latest round of them.) But in this case it really is time for someone to bitch-slap @Ghost and let him see what he's coming across as.

@Auspice
Sorry to hear about your travails and bad news, and I wish I could help out.

Yeah, that bus thing sucks. (Buses suck in general, but it's oh-so-much-worse when you're unfamiliar with a new system.)

@surreality said:

@WTFE Dear god, you're going to do it, aren't you.

oh please oh please oh please

If you insist, sure. But I need a few more orifices filled out here before I make this.

@faraday said in What is out there? Hard and soft codebases of choice.:

But I like to think it's a marked improvement over my Penn codebase because each plugin clearly defines the interfaces (APIs) that other plugins are allowed to use.

One of the things that makes me call MUSHcode "a fucking horror" is its utter lack of modularity, so kudos here.

@saosmash said in RL things I love:

My noodles were so hot at lunch that I still have that spicy burn feeling around my mouth after driving back to the office. Yet no garlic or ginger flavors were sacrificed in my food in pursuit of lighting my mouth on fire. A+.

See the pictures of my lunch above that I was taunting @Ganymede with? Note the weird bowl separated into two broths, one red, one white? The red broth had so many Sichuan peppercorns in it that my lips were tingling two hours after I left the restaurant.

Hi, @saosmash, pleasure to meet someone else who appreciates a good burn!

@Jeshin said:

Truthfully I think the primary gap to bridge is that we're much more likely to discuss topics freely and with less "this is how it is" style writing on Optional Realities itself.

OK, I'm going to try to keep this polite. (I may fail.)

You're here, presumably, given that this is in the "Adver-tis-ments" section of the board, to get people to want to come over to your community. And yet here we have you saying, basically, that you're more open to different opinions there than you are here.

Do you genuinely not see how stupid this is?

I have thus far refused to go to your site—to even crack it open and look at it—specifically because of the behaviour of the people from your site over here. By being so dogmatic, rigid, and inflexible, and by sticking to a definition of game that specifically excludes the styles played by most people on this board, you are actually being off-putting. You absolutely do not come across as inviting discussion. If anything you should be more conciliatory and flexible when you're out of your domain than in. You're in effect acting as ambassador for your site, after all. And right now, Mr. Ambassador, your site is smelling like the Platonic Form of web sites that need to be avoided at all costs.

Now maybe Three-Eyed Crow is right. Maybe the problem isn't that you're intractable. Maybe the problem is that you're a salesman. If that is, indeed, the problem, you might want to consider toning down the sales persona a notch or ten. Aggressive sales techniques work fine if you're going for one, short-term sale instead of a long-term relationship. (Their use makes you a dick, but if you're comfortable with that it's a great strategy.) The thing is ... participation in a community is pretty much by definition a long-term relationship. If you're genuinely interested in such, perhaps you may wish to rethink your approach to building these.

@Lithium That was the joke. I'm decaffeinated. Sorry.

@Luna said:

@WTFE Engineers are straight up crazy people.

I know. I'm a co-founder of a small engineering startup. All my partners are engineers of varying kinds.