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What we can learn from video game tutorials
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@Pyrephox While I think the above is an excellently cool idea, it works in video games because it can be automated by the code, scripted to have events happen in specific way. It’s a lot more difficult to constrain in a free floating RP setting such that it would require each and every player to be hand rolled through an event by an ST/GM which, again, very cool is an immense drain on staff resources.
Aka awesome, but very hard to reasonably do in practice on a MU*
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@Jumpscare Back when I was writing for casual games, I put together the tutorial for one of them, and had my (now ex-) wife come in to try it out. She got about 2 steps in, having followed the directions, and then said she couldn’t figure out what to do next. The instructions were in flashing white and red letters in the exact same place she had been reading instructions before. She just hadn’t looked back there. When it was pointed out to her (not by me, which I considered a major win), she was able to continue, but it took her like 5 minutes of being frustrated.
It is impossible to make a tutorial simple enough that people will not get confused/stuck, but wow, that’s a lot of good effort being put into it, @Jumpscare.
@Pyrephox That example sounds awesome… but it also sounds like a TON of work for a staff to do for a game with more than 15-20 characters. Because that investigation will have to be GMed, and the encounters will have to be GMed, and the follow-on would have to be directed to other PCs by a GM. As @Mourne said, awesome, and I would love to do it, but way too much effort to be practicable on most games.
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Yes, that’s why I said “in a perfect world with infinite GMs”.
However, I think that you can get SOME of that if you sit down and really think about why PCs are involved in the game, and what they need in order to fully engage with it.
There may not be the staff to give every PC a custom opening scene. But you could very easily condense what might happen in that opening scene into an opening vignette, that has at the end “Here’s some ideas for following up on what your PC learned, here’s a few PCs you might immediately reach out to, either because they’re likely to find someone who’s been tossed half-dead in the harbor, or because they’re sorcerers like you, or whatever.” You could even give PCs a very definite goal with a reward in it: “Post scenes talking to four PCs (alone or in any combination) about what you discovered during your opening vignette. Put in a job linking to the logs, and you’ll receive a lead/bonus/NPC contact/XP/WHATEVER.”
Give people something to work with, and give them some starting ideas on how to work with it.
EDIT: It’s also worth thinking about if a game SHOULD have “more than 15-20 players” if staff aren’t capable of GMing for that many people. A good deal of MU* issues come, at heart, from being too large, and not having enough staff to give the players the oversight and interaction that is needed. I’d much rather have a landscape with five games with 25 players, at most, than 1 game 225 players who can’t get any response back from staff or do anything because there’s no one available to adjudicate it.
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@Pyrephox I agree that it would be fantastic for Staff to talk to players as they’re creating characters and make sure that they have hooks to metaplot and other characters. And I think that’s a realistic goal.
And while I agree that games shouldn’t over-player for what staff can handle, trying to run an intro scene for every character is significantly more time commitment than “normal” GMing. I definitely agree that 5 games with 25 players getting regular GM attention is better than 1 game with 225 players not getting enough staff attention.
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So I was thinking about this, and I don’t necessarily think it’s not something that can’t be implemented in the MU* format. Instead of doing a plot ran by a GM/ST for each person, if the game was designed to include it you could easily have an ‘introductory’ choose your own adventure type of thing coded in.
I could do it, and I am not the best coder, therefor it has to be easily done by the super coders that abound all over.
You could even do it like Bloodlines where the game asks questions and the answers designed the sheet. Which would be really cool if using a custom system or one that is not well known.
Damnit…
How much is mush hosting these days?
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@Mourne said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:
How much is mush hosting these days?
$10/month will get you a basic setup that’s probably sufficient for a MUSH.
$20/month will be top notch and more than sufficient to run a large game, a wiki with plenty of storage space for images, etc.
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@Arkandel said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:
$10/month will get you a basic setup that’s probably sufficient for a MUSH.
$20/month will be top notch and more than sufficient to run a large game, a wiki with plenty of storage space for images, etc.The standard Ares hosting plan through Digital Ocean is $12/mo and has enough power for all but the biggest games (including the wiki/webportal).
Disclosure: I do get a referral bonus for DO that funds the AresCentral server, but I was using and recommending it even before that.
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@Faraday That’d be cool, but I don’t know Ruby/Python so no Ares for me.
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Standing up a base install of Ares with FS3 is honestly pretty easy. Faraday’s documentation is COMPREHENSIVE and the discord is very helpful. I hear. I’m not there. BUT I HEAR GOOD THINGS.
You can even customize using the web portal without coding. It’s not hard to do the bare minimum.
Just, you know. It is the bare minimum. Obviously customizing it DOES take real work. But anyone who doesn’t have that knowledge shouldn’t feel discouraged from trying the base install!!
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@Mourne said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:
You could even do it like Bloodlines where the game asks questions and the answers designed the sheet. Which would be really cool if using a custom system or one that is not well known.
This takes me back to FFXI, when all the info was hidden, and people sat around hacking the game and running endless tests to figure out what stats things actually gave you. It was incredibly annoying to learn that “I like cats more than dogs” meant you got +31.3% crit but -29.44% luck.
So as long as you can also see the numbers? Could be cool. But I would not want to go back to the days of hidden stats and side-effects.
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@KarmaBum Hidden side effects is bad game design imho.
My idea would be that choices would not hurt the player, they’d just be directions in which they got stronger.
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@Mourne You could run Evennia just as easily on that tier server.
For the old MU servers (Rhost/Penn/Tiny) there are shared hosting sites to run the game itself for cheap. But if you want a wiki too it’ll depend on the requirements of the wiki you choose.
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@Faraday Oh, Evennia takes Python, I am not professional coder so I only know Tiny/Rhost/Penn. The way I read that was you only offered hosting for Ares games only.
I may be in touch if I could run older style codebase.
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@Mourne Just to clarify, I don’t handle the hosting myself. Digital Ocean is just the company I refer people to. Linode is another good option if you need a standalone server.
If all you need is to run Rhost/Penn/Tiny without a website, use a shared MU host. I used to use Genesis MUDs but that was like 10 years ago. Don’t know if they’re still any good, but their base hosting package for the oldschool MUs is $5/mo.
Though for the record, like Tez said - you don’t actually have to touch the code to run an Ares game. It comes with everything out of the box. It’s only if you want custom code, like your own skills system, that you would need to do anything with Ruby.
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@Mourne Have you seen what @Jumpscare has been up to with Silent Heaven?
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That reminds me that I still need to make a post showing off all the systems so far.
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@KarmaBum said in What we can learn from video game tutorials:
@Mourne Have you seen what @Jumpscare has been up to with Silent Heaven?
I have actually, I am not sure it’s a game for me, but the technical aspects have really helped get my creative juices going for converting systems.
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@Jumpscare Yes please! I’m really interested in what you’ve been doing.
