Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG

[Pavel]

@icanbeyourmuse Aye, the text seems to be the same (or exceptionally similar) colour to the background.

[Jumpscare]

@icanbeyourmuse
Thanks for the report! I’ll see about fixing it.

[STD]

Okay, having looked through the help files, some headscratchers have come up.

First, in Help->Character->Consent there’s this line:

“You’re allowed to perform one check per day, and your character must be in the same room as that character. Storytellers are allowed multiple checks per day, but only for purposes of running storylines.”

Why the limitation? Should not players be allowed to check things others are consenting to whenever and however many times they need? This is an OOC tool, is it not? Meant to help everyone have a fun time? So why limit it? Why not have the entire list open at all times, like a Kinks list on a SexMU? I don’t understand the rationale here.

Under Help->Beginner->Newbie there is this:

“5. You must find a safe place to sleep before closing the game window. If you don’t, your character will be vulnerable while you’re disconnected. You will find a safe place to sleep shortly after entering the town.”

Again, why? Why is the common MU* standard of just having the character in Abstraction Land when not connected not used?

ETA: This is particularly confusing as: “At almost any time, you are able to pause your game, which puts your character in a metaphorical protective bubble that prevents anything from happening to your character.”

So the concept of Abstraction Land exists anyway.

Also, I could find no reference to an OOC command in the files. Did I miss it? The reason I ask is because the policies I’ve seen thusfar and the reference to the shudder Discord seem to indicate there ISN’T one on the game proper. Which I think is a huge, huge, HUGE mistake, if true.

Not really a question, but I think you need another category for the types of consent given. Something between Green and Yellow that indicates that someone is willing to play out something, but would like to be asked OOC first (as opposed to Green which is all in, no asking needed).

[Raeras]

@STD while I can’t speak for the other stuff there is an ooc command for more immediate where you are and a game channel you can ask at in via game or discord, connected to discord so anything asked can be answered from game or discord.

I’m not sure of any other ooc channels though in game.

[mietze]

How essential is being on the discord as far as connecting with other players/seeking RP?

[Jumpscare]

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

Why the limitation? Should not players be allowed to check things others are consenting to whenever and however many times they need? This is an OOC tool, is it not? Meant to help everyone have a fun time? So why limit it? Why not have the entire list open at all times, like a Kinks list on a SexMU? I don’t understand the rationale here.

Hi there! Thanks for your questions.

I want players to RP with others for a while before introducing potentially sensitive moments into their RP. In other words, if you really want to do more than one kind of possibly triggering activity with someone (or the same activity with multiple people), I only ask that you’ve RP’d with them for more than one day.

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

So the concept of Abstraction Land exists anyway.

I’m not sure what you mean by Abstraction Land, but here are a few example.

Suppose your character falls unconscious due to jumping off of an unsafe height. Someone else can grab your character and bring them to a doctor character to be treated.

Or, suppose your character decides to fall asleep out on the streets. Another character can grab your character and take them to safety. Very, very little can actually happen to your character while asleep, but the theme is a dangerous town, so getting someplace safe before going to sleep is in-theme. It’s not something commonplace in other games.

If you have to go and can’t move to a safe room, send a message using the GM command and I’ll be able to move your character for you.

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

Also, I could find no reference to an OOC command in the files. Did I miss it?

Yes, sorry, it’s PAUSE. You can pause your game at any time and your character gets put into a metaphorical bubble so you can go do RL stuff as desired.

@mietze said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

How essential is being on the discord as far as connecting with other players/seeking RP?

Not necessary at all! We mostly just chat OOCly in there and help people who have questions about game mechanics.

IC, there’s a mysterious air current that allows your character’s whispers to spread throughout the town. It’s how people are able to find RP ICly. You can check out HELP WIND to learn all about it.

(I’m sorry that all the help text on the website is in a dark color. I’ll get that fixed. Thanks for your patience!)

[Third Eye]

@Jumpscare
How simple is it OOCly to get back to your character’s safe place (their home, whatever) if you need to log off (it’s late, RL demands mean lack of ability for immediate screen attention, whatever)? I understand there’s not really fast-travel commands but this is a somewhat uninformed piece of information (like, can you ‘home’ or the equivalent)?

[Coin]

@Jumpscare said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

Also, I could find no reference to an OOC command in the files. Did I miss it?

Yes, sorry, it’s PAUSE. You can pause your game at any time and your character gets put into a metaphorical bubble so you can go do RL stuff as desired.

If there is a PAUSE command, could it not automatically get set if you disconnect? I’m just thinking about using an existing system to solve one of the other concerns.

[Pyrephox]

@Third-Eye said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

@Jumpscare
How simple is it OOCly to get back to your character’s safe place (their home, whatever) if you need to log off (it’s late, RL demands mean lack of ability for immediate screen attention, whatever)? I understand there’s not really fast-travel commands but this is a somewhat uninformed piece of information (like, can you ‘home’ or the equivalent)?

Everyone gets issued a free room at an IC hotel once they get out of chargen. It’s an entirely safe place, and getting back to it hasn’t been difficult thus far. I gather that once you start doing something to earn money, there are other places around town you can rent. Those may be more difficult to remember/return to.

I do really wish for OOC chatter channels, and ways to page/find people that are OOC, like +where and the like. The wind thing is cool as flavor, but not really intuitive as to finding a specific scene, and also it just feels a little…isolated and lonely. I like the atmosphere of the town, and poking around exploring things. The code is really interesting, and I love the way each step takes you to a separate screen so you’re not doing the +thing/switch/switch/short text=long text process all the time. This is MUCH more intuitive, and it’d be great if it caught on elsewhere. Kudos for the coding.

As far as an immersive horror game, there have definitely been some creepy moments, but I’ve only played briefly so can’t say much. I miss the OOC tools that I’m accustomed to, but I’m willing to give it some time to see how I adapt.

[Jumpscare]

@Third-Eye said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

How simple is it OOCly to get back to your character’s safe place (their home, whatever) if you need to log off (it’s late, RL demands mean lack of ability for immediate screen attention, whatever)? I understand there’s not really fast-travel commands but this is a somewhat uninformed piece of information (like, can you ‘home’ or the equivalent)?

The town is small. I think the absolute farthest place on the grid from your character’s hotel room is about 11 rooms away.

If you don’t know how to get back there, asking almost any NPC “Where’s the hotel?” will prompt them to tell you how to get there from your current room.

@Coin said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

If there is a PAUSE command, could it not automatically get set if you disconnect? I’m just thinking about using an existing system to solve one of the other concerns.

That’s a great idea! I’ll make sure to add it soon. Thanks!

[STD]

@Jumpscare said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

Hi there! Thanks for your questions.

Thanks for taking the time to answer!

I want players to RP with others for a while before introducing potentially sensitive moments into their RP. In other words, if you really want to do more than one kind of possibly triggering activity with someone (or the same activity with multiple people), I only ask that you’ve RP’d with them for more than one day.

This seems more like something that should be solved with just a policy rather than code. That’s why this is so confusing to me. The whole point for the consent system is to provide information on what others are comfortable with. Limiting its use is counterproductive to that and MAY result in exactly the problem you’re trying to prevent happening accidentally (since people can only check ONE thing per day).

It’d be better, I think, to just have a player’s consent rules easily accessible all the time and just have a policy in place that says, ‘Please don’t do anything squicky with someone unless you’ve already RPed with them for over a day.’

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

So the concept of Abstraction Land exists anyway.

I’m not sure what you mean by Abstraction Land, but here are a few example.

It’s called different things. Offstage, In Pocket, Abstraction Land, Backgrounded. Basically, when a character isn’t available, they are considered just ‘around’ in some nebulous, non interactable way.

Suppose your character falls unconscious due to jumping off of an unsafe height. Someone else can grab your character and bring them to a doctor character to be treated.

But someone unconscious would still be online, correct? You’re not forcibly kicked off the MU* if the character becomes unconscious, I’d assume?

Or, suppose your character decides to fall asleep out on the streets. Another character can grab your character and take them to safety. Very, very little can actually happen to your character while asleep, but the theme is a dangerous town, so getting someplace safe before going to sleep is in-theme. It’s not something commonplace in other games.

I suppose what I don’t get is why the character’s state is linked to whether the player is online? A player might not be around a while, but the character can be assumed to be doing stuff in the background. I don’t see why there’s this hard link between connection and character state.

It is very different from other games, so it might just be that I don’t and will never get it. I’m old.

If you have to go and can’t move to a safe room, send a message using the GM command and I’ll be able to move your character for you.

So there isn’t an equivalent of a HOME command, either? Or an easy means to teleporting to scenes?

Yes, sorry, it’s PAUSE. You can pause your game at any time and your character gets put into a metaphorical bubble so you can go do RL stuff as desired.

Okay, that’s good. What about OOC communication? Someone else mentioned there’s a channel that is accessible on the game.

[Faraday]

@Jumpscare said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

If you have to go and can’t move to a safe room, send a message using the GM command and I’ll be able to move your character for you.

Sometimes people have to log off suddenly and don’t necessarily have time to type a command first. Or they just lose connection. Power goes out, cat turns off the computer, who even knows. Kinda sucks if you get disconnected and log back in all messed up.

[Pavel]

I think we’re all coming at this with a more ‘traditional’ MUSH mindset, when this seems (at least to me) more of a role-play-intensive MUD kind of environ, at least as it’s presented. So our cultural mores and expectations might be off.

[Jumpscare]

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
It’d be better, I think, to just have a player’s consent rules easily accessible all the time and just have a policy in place that says, ‘Please don’t do anything squicky with someone unless you’ve already RPed with them for over a day.’

I’d like to give this a week or so. If the core playerbase would prefer it be open and accessible in the manner you describe, I’ll be happy to open it up further.

There’s actually a metric in the backend that counts how much you’ve RP’d with each other character, so I might even be able to set it to a certain limit of interaction.

Thanks for the feedback on this one!

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
I suppose what I don’t get is why the character’s state is linked to whether the player is online? A player might not be around a while, but the character can be assumed to be doing stuff in the background. I don’t see why there’s this hard link between connection and character state.

Ah, I understand now! Yes, when someone logs off, their character object remains on the grid as a sleeping object. This was an intentional divergence on my part from how other games handle things. I could have made character objects disappear from the grid when they log off, but in support of the horror aesthetic, I made the choice that getting back to a safe spot is a part of core gameplay.

If you need to go immediately, that’s fine, just PAUSE.

If you get disconnected, that’s fine too. I’ll add it so that you get auto-paused during disconnection.

If you want to intentionally have your character sleep out on the streets, you can do that and see where your character wakes up.

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
So there isn’t an equivalent of a HOME command, either? Or an easy means to teleporting to scenes?

That’s correct, there isn’t. I’m sure this will turn some people off, but I hope it helps convey the horror aesthetic of being in a spooky small town.

@STD said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:
Okay, that’s good. What about OOC communication? Someone else mentioned there’s a channel that is accessible on the game.

Yes, the GAME command lets you chat on the game help channel to ask and answer questions. You can also use the OOC command to chat locally, and you can type GM to communicate privately with staff (which is just me right now). I encourage use of these!

I chose to move the general OOC chatter to Discord to make a clear delineation between IC and OOC. I’ve seen games that blur the lines with this. So considering the theme of the game, I felt it was a good idea.

Thanks again! I’m always open to considering changes.

I think the best way to get an idea for whether or not the game is a good fit is to play through the chargen experience. If you get to your hotel room and you’re craving more, then you’ll probably enjoy it in Silent Heaven.

Otherwise, thanks for giving it a try!

[Jumpscare]

@Faraday said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

@Jumpscare said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

If you have to go and can’t move to a safe room, send a message using the GM command and I’ll be able to move your character for you.

Sometimes people have to log off suddenly and don’t necessarily have time to type a command first. Or they just lose connection. Power goes out, cat turns off the computer, who even knows. Kinda sucks if you get disconnected and log back in all messed up.

That can’t happen. I’m sorry if I misspoke and it came off that way, but your character can’t suffer any harm when disconnected.

@Pavel said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

I think we’re all coming at this with a more ‘traditional’ MUSH mindset, when this seems (at least to me) more of a role-play-intensive MUD kind of environ, at least as it’s presented. So our cultural mores and expectations might be off.

There’s inspiration from both worlds, and I would call it a hybrid of the two.

As the front page says:

RPI-lite: MUSH-style RP + coded support for supplementary skills.

[NotSanni]

@Pavel said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

I think we’re all coming at this with a more ‘traditional’ MUSH mindset, when this seems (at least to me) more of a role-play-intensive MUD kind of environ, at least as it’s presented. So our cultural mores and expectations might be off.

My first impressions (having gone through Char-Gen/Tutorial, both of which are very good and like Jumpscare said probably very good indicators as to whether or not Silent Heaven will be a good fit for someone) is that it sits somewhere between RPI and MUSH (maybe more of a MOO, idk, all of the labels get a bit weird and sometimes I think the MU community relies on them too heavily).

It’s live, real time RP, with some crunch, but progression isn’t gated behind repetitive skill-based activities the way it generally would be in the RPIs and RP-enforced MUDs I’ve played in the past. I think the front page of the website says “RPI-Lite” and I think that’s a good way to put it.

My gut feel from wandering the grid a bit and reading helpfiles/interacting with the code a bit is that the systems Jumpscare has in place do a great job of telegraphing the theme and setting of the game.

[STD]

@Jumpscare

Thanks again for your responses! I really do appreciate it.

Sadly, after much hemming and hawing, I don’t think the place is for me. The lack of OOC tools to facilitate RP just is too big a hurdle for me to surmount. I don’t have much time these days, so wandering around a grid in desperate search for RP is just not something I have the patience for any more. I’ve really been spoiled by Ares.

Which really sucks, because I LOVE Silent Hill and the theme and setting of Silent Heaven sounds great!

Regardless, I wish you luck in your endeavor! Have fun!

[Jumpscare]

@STD
While I will say that I made a suite of IC tools to assist in finding RP, I completely understand that that’s a dealbreaker for you.

Thank you too! You helped give me some excellent blueprints for improvements.

[somasatori]

@NotSanni said in Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG:

It’s live, real time RP, with some crunch, but progression isn’t gated behind repetitive skill-based activities the way it generally would be in the RPIs and RP-enforced MUDs I’ve played in the past. I think the front page of the website says “RPI-Lite” and I think that’s a good way to put it.

It reminds me a lot of the RPI MUDs I played before I was introduced to MUX/MUSH. Towers of Jadri springs to mind, as there’s a big plot, strong theme, and crunchy commands. I like it a lot so far. I will say that I’m very unused to RPI MUD culture these days so I feel like my long MU* poses are a bit out of place (probably just me), but I’m getting used to it. So far it’s been a nice way to ease back into the hobby.

[Testament]

While I will say that I do wish there was more OOC tools to facilitate communication, it’s not what I could call a dealbreaker for me, however in my mind, I think it creates more of a hinderance. That said, I do I understand that this is a me issue. I like having readily accessible WHO and WHERE lists. I like having traditional page system. Call it old comfort or simply something that I’m used to. I don’t deny that this might just be a situation where it’s something drastically new and I’m not used to it, IC justifications and reasons aside.

If I have any real gripe, it’s the lag between moving through rooms. I understand that raising certain skills mitigate that, but man, I’ll admit that it’s the one thing that just annoys me.

Reminds me that I haven’t seen lag times between moving room to room in over a decade. I think the last time I remember talking about it is when I had friend who played on this fantasy mush(cira 2007 or so? Called Chia-something. It was a fantasy game)that had like ten minute ‘travel’ times between rooms or something crazy like that. Never played the game, but I can recall that being a huge reason why I never stepped foot on it when I asked my friend about it.