Minigames in MUSHes

Third Eye

I’m not a mini-game person so I’ve kinda stayed out of this thread. This kind of thing will never attract me to a game, it’ll either me an ‘oh that’s nice’ thing I engage with sometimes but appreciate being able to avoid, or a I think that just makes me nope the fuck out because, Not For Me! That’s OK.

So, grain of salt.

For me, the big question with all this stuff is, why aren’t you just playing a single-player video game or MMO to get your engagement fix? They do a lot of ‘mini-game’ things better. So, what’s the appeal, for a person into this sort of thing, of not just having that open on your secondary monitor? What does it add to an experience that’s unique to a MUSH?

ANSI art and object descing absolutely do this. While I didn’t do much with them personally, I always enjoyed seeing what people created, and it’s a unique form of creativity you can do on a telnet-based client you can’t do anywhere else.

Jennkryst

@Third-Eye Generally, because ‘Pose, minigame, other person pose, I respond, minigame, repeat’ keeps my attention focused on this window. If I tab away, I could ADHD and forget to check back for hours.

Rucket

@dvoraen said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Tez So what I am hearing is I should make puppy-eyes at Tehom to do this for Arx II. Over Aion knows how many months.

cries in database schema

These are lying eyes and no one should trust them! Anyway, the real mini game should be a jumping puzzle. Everyone loves jumping puzzles.

dvoraen

@Rucket said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@dvoraen said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Tez So what I am hearing is I should make puppy-eyes at Tehom to do this for Arx II. Over Aion knows how many months.

cries in database schema

These are lying eyes and no one should trust them! Anyway, the real mini game should be a jumping puzzle. Everyone loves jumping puzzles.

Using ASCII-art minis that you created/painted?

Gashlycrumb

@Jennkryst said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Third-Eye Generally, because ‘Pose, minigame, other person pose, I respond, minigame, repeat’ keeps my attention focused on this window. If I tab away, I could ADHD and forget to check back for hours.

Legit. But if you wanted to do it by making your client beep at you when a new pose comes up, that feature is probably there? Or no.

Once some MOOs had a @beep command, which was handy, but you couldn’t easlily prevent people making your machine beep and I’m sure you can imagine what happened.

Muscle Car

@Gashlycrumb Keli loved that skull!

Tez

@Third-Eye said in Minigames in MUSHes:

For me, the big question with all this stuff is, why aren’t you just playing a single-player video game or MMO to get your engagement fix? They do a lot of ‘mini-game’ things better. So, what’s the appeal, for a person into this sort of thing, of not just having that open on your secondary monitor? What does it add to an experience that’s unique to a MUSH?

100% the heart of the question. I’ve been talking about this with a few other people – you know who you are – and like. I fucking love Harvest Moon games. Hours poured into HM, SoS, Stardew, all of the many variations-- Let’s just say it’s a lot. And survival games! Oh my God, Conan, I love you. ARK, you fucking beloved mess. I thought for a hot sec about how that genre might work as a MUSH, but I don’t know how you would replicate ‘die to a fucking monster, wake up, punch a tree to get a branch to make an axe’ in a satisfying way.

It’s a bad idea as a MUSH. I don’t think you can get the same dopamine, the same feedback loop, out of breaking rocks and punching trees. Video games give you sight, sound, real designed elements that work together to create a satisfying feedback loops that makes the grind provide the dopamine.

Fundamentally the thing that MUSH does well is typing words with other people. You have to find minigames that succeed with that at the core.

Yam

@Tez This does kind of make me wonder what MUD players get out of it, lol. I mean I imagine they’re trying to replicate MMOs. Or, well, they were the proto MMOs I guess. I see that people still play them! At least on r/MUD

Third Eye

@Yam
MUDs absolutely suffered more from the rise of MMOs than more RP-centric games did. You CAN RP in WoW but it’s a real different experience than logging onto a MUSH and posing with other players. There are still players left because ultimately some hobbyists will always stick with Their Thing but you saw the impact more in that space than in MUSHes 15ish years ago.

MisterBoring

I would also hedge a bet that some of the MUDs out there are far more mechanically complicated than the average MMORPG simply because they don’t have to waste processing power on graphics and sound.

Pavel

@Tez said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Video games give you sight, sound, real designed elements that work together to create a satisfying feedback loops that makes the grind provide the dopamine.

They even occasionally hire psychologists to work out the best ways to do this so they can take a lot of your money.

somasatori

@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Tez said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Video games give you sight, sound, real designed elements that work together to create a satisfying feedback loops that makes the grind provide the dopamine.

They even occasionally hire psychologists to work out the best ways to do this so they can take a lot of your money.

Just waiting for the call from Activision so I can pay the half a million dollars I accrued in student loans

somasatori

Double post!

So in PyReach, which is what I’m calling my Evennia nWoD project, there’s something that I’ve been working on for a little bit which I’m just generally referring to as the mystery system. Here’s the basics of how it works:

Staff and players who are running plots can create mysteries, which are basically just investigative plots, PRP or otherwise, that players can do. They’re designed to be attached to existing plots that are being run, but don’t necessarily have to be. Someone can do a self-contained investigation without it being a whole thing.

The plot runner creates the mystery and then can go around to different grid rooms or locations on the MUSH and create clues. Clues can be built into objects, exits, rooms, and even characters (though PCs receive a note that requires their consent. The different types of clues are attached to different methods of searching for said clue.

You have investigative clues (things you can easily see and need to be searched or directly investigated), perceptive clues (things that you might notice about the environment at a glance or a feeling), research (like your traditional library/internet sort of searching), and interviews (talking to an NPC). The plot-runner will specify the type of clue and then, if they want, they can specify a set of dice they need to roll to do it, as well as a general difficulty (between 1 and 5). Further, players can specify prereqs to view a clue. So you might need to be a vampire, a mage, a mummy, a demon, or you might need a specific level of a skill or a merit, like Unseen Sense or Occult 3.

For example, let’s say I set up an investigative clue called ‘ritual circle’ in a room. My plot is a difficulty 1 plot, not designed to be super difficult and good for newcomers, pretty low stakes. I’ll leave it as having the default difficulty. I’m also not going to specify any prereqs on it as it’s a big bloody ritual circle in a room and this is also designed for mortals. Since this is a search clue (which I realize doesn’t show up on the screenshot, but something to add I suppose), I default to rolling Wits + Investigation. If I succeed, I’m rewarded with the descriptive text of the clue and we roll the progress percentage forward.

The idea behind this is to do a couple things:
1) it should hopefully make it a little easier to create more engaging plots that can be accessed by people outside of scenes.
2) it makes better use of the grid, since things will be hidden on the grid itself and require digging around on it. Additionally, I’m working out the kinks on it but I’ve set up a “leads” element that the clue will tell you where you should go to find the next one.
2a) Ideally people would RP around searching for clues and shit, but either way it would allow for some engagement in the plot from people who can’t make a 3pm Eastern Standard Time scene.
3) I often play investigative characters and it usually kind of sucks unless you have people who are making plots specifically for those kind of characters. In my experience, a lot of plots tend to be combat focused or socially-focused.

There’s a decent amount of work ahead for this, but it’s a good work-in-progress so far. I’m on the fence about having a participants list for individual mysteries, since on one hand it would be cool to stumble into a clue and be drawn into a mystery that way, but on the other it would also kinda suck to have someone snipe clues who isn’t really part of the plot. It currently notifies the mystery maker as to who has discovered the clue, and then will allow for multiple discoveries of the same clue, so maybe I’m making more work for myself here.

To be continued!

Gashlycrumb

@Muscle-Car Hehe! I think I loved that skull and the raven more than anybody else did. I don’t think people chatted in the OOC room enough to find out all the shit the raven reacted to.

I was working on another one, but I am shite at coding so that sort of thing always took me forever. It was a sort of, uh, senseless endless RIsk game where it emoted that the player turned a crank on the side of a map table, making music-box music and causing the paper pop-up of a random city come up. Then you needed somebody else to have a go. If it rolled you a city that was already popped up it’d cause the city to produce an army of <number between whatevers> <temperament related adjective> <profession> (200 jolly butchers, 475 savage street urchins) that you could direct. So the desc of the object would be some ever-changing silly stuff about it being a table with a map of Westeros on it and The North is controlled by the Crownlands using an army of 765 serene whores and so on.

I didn’t expect people to care about those toys, it was just for me to puzzle out how to make them and snigger to myself about them.

Rucket

@somasatori so you could also set up clues using a skill like Academics or Occult? Could be neat for a cop sphere to have clues tied into Medicine for autopsy stuff too I guess. Sounds neat!

somasatori

@Rucket said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@somasatori so you could also set up clues using a skill like Academics or Occult? Could be neat for a cop sphere to have clues tied into Medicine for autopsy stuff too I guess. Sounds neat!

Yep, that’s right. It’s all modular and tag-based, so you could do an x-files thing and have a prerequisite for “group:law,occult:1” (any member of law enforcement with at least one dot of occult). It just operates based on checking the character for the appropriate attribute and then verifying the value, which is either an integer or nominal. You could get really really specific with it and do “group:law,template:changeling,occult:3,wyrd:2,mantle:1,court:summer” This would be a changeling cop with 3 dots of occult and at least Wyrd 2 and a dot of mantle as a member of the Summer Court.

Pyrephox

@somasatori Holy crap I love that.

Faraday

@somasatori said in Minigames in MUSHes:

it should hopefully make it a little easier to create more engaging plots that can be accessed by people outside of scenes.

Code-wise, that’s really neat. Props.

People-wise I fear that you’re just going to run into folks clue-farming just by wandering around the grid using random skills or whatever to search for stuff. (That’s been my personal experience with trying to do coded ‘discovery’ things in the past, and also in puzzle games. I remember my friend searching for a mystery clue in Wasteland back in 1997 just clicking “Use -> Perception” in random directions over and over again.) It also seems like it would take a metric ton of prep-work to arrange the clues for a plot in a way that neither gets solved too quickly nor gets blocked when someone can’t find one specific clue.

Those concerns aside, it’s an interesting idea and I’m all for people trying new things.

somasatori

@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@somasatori said in Minigames in MUSHes:
People-wise I fear that you’re just going to run into folks clue-farming just by wandering around the grid using random skills or whatever to search for stuff.

Yeah, this is my fear as well ._. That’s why I was thinking that I might make it participant based, where someone signs up to join the mystery, similar to like an events system. That won’t prevent people from joining mysteries and clue farming to troll, but I figure whoever uses the system can ban that person after that point I guess.

I was also thinking about setting it so that a mystery participant makes progress in the mystery - as in they advance the progress tracker- and people who aren’t signed up to the mystery will get some kind of option to be initiated. It would also allow for people not connected to the mystery to discover a clue that might have already been investigated and be “initiated” into the mystery apparatus.

“I discovered the ritual circle in the warehouse on 12th Street that points to the cultists of the crimson warden.”
“We knew this already, but you show good initiative!”
etc.

I’m not making a MUSH, I’m kind of doing a mu-in-a-box thing for nwod since I very much missed the genre over the usual 20th anniversary/old world of darkness current trend (though I’ll probably set up a prototype sandbox once (read: if it ever) is done).

Pavel

@somasatori There’s an easy solution, though. Just code a way for observant staffers to slap clue-farmers upside the head through the internet.