Grid vs Web Scenes

Third Eye

I realize there are still tinymux islands out there, traditional moos, etc, but I gather most of this forum is or has been on at least one Ares game.

This is YET ANOTHER OFF-TOPIC POST in a thread that was forked already, but a lot of this is ease of actually finding a game. I used to troll MudConnector for games but that site is imo basically unusable now and no replacement has stuck. They certainly exist, I have some of them bookmarked, but they’re neither particularly user-friendly or complete. Ares and Evennia has complete and easy-to-view game listings, so that’s what people know about, at least this audience.

I honestly have no idea how I’d even go about finding a new MUSH/MUX at this point apart from hollering into the wilderness either here or on Reddit’s r/mud section with mixed results.

sao

@Trashcan I used to do it all the time specifically so that I could avoid having to come up with the required location name. Physically go to place, scene/start. Sometimes, I would start the client, go to the place, scene/start, then RP the whole scene on the portal via web.

Otherwise I would do whole scene and try to post and realize I didn’t have a location set and it wouldn’t let me because apparently knowing where you are in rp is critically important.

bear_necessities

@sao said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

because apparently knowing where you are in rp is critically important.

this is why I came up with “Somewhere out there” and “Textlandia” as locations because I am, in fact, out there somewhere.

KarmaBum

@sao I used to do this, too. If it helps you any…

You can also do this by going to the /locations directory on the game, finding the room, and clicking “Start Scene” from there.

It still marks them as Temp Rooms, but it imports location name and room description into the scene for you. Which I like.

The only flaw I’ve found is that, if you then change the location using the portal, it keeps the original room desc in the scene info.

sao

@KarmaBum Yes! That is the only way I ever found anywhere on Shattered while I existed there, because at that time I was no longer using a client much for a variety of reasons.

Third Eye

Oh good, other people use the ‘Locations’ menu to start scenes, whenever I say this is almost exclusively how I do it people are surprised.

Trashcan

@KarmaBum said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

The only flaw I’ve found is that, if you then change the location using the portal, it keeps the original room desc in the scene info.

I thought this for a long time before discovering that instead of going to ‘Edit Scene’ and changing the value for Location, there is an honest-to-god ‘Change Location’ BUTTON under the ‘Play’ menu.

KarmaBum

@Trashcan I’ll be damned.

Thank you!!!

helvetica

@Trashcan mind blown

Yam

Ah the annual rediscovery of the change location button

Faraday

@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Even knowing that you could start a scene from the grid, again, I never saw anyone do it and I never did it even though I’d just come from a game where that was the only way of RPing. Why? Because it is just so much easier to click ‘Create a Scene’ and fill out the fields, which you will need to do anyway to share it and it’s clunky to do them all from the client. You don’t have to wander the grid like a fool peering in shop windows for the right room. You can just select from the list.

It should be covered in the basic help files/tutorial, but even setting that aside - There’s almost no functional difference between starting a scene from the grid and starting the scene from the web portal. If you mark it open to the public, both provide a way for any random person to join the scene and RP according to the scene’s pacing from either the MU client or the web portal.

So yes, it’s different, but it’s not different in a way that (IMHO) makes it harder to play live.

To your other point though - yes, there’s a default private setting for web/off-grid scenes, but it used to default to Open. Lots of people complained, because the majority wanted the default to be private. So I changed the default. You’re saying that game design is influencing behavior, but it’s actually the other way around.

Harkening back to the “old days” - you could start a scene in a TP room or on grid. It’s a choice. Even before Ares there were people complaining about “too many” people doing private TP room scenes, which always felt like WrongFun to me. YMMV of course.

Pavel

@Third-Eye I sometimes peek at https://www.mushcode.com/mushlist. YMMV as to its usefulness.

hellfrog

@Faraday said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Are we getting more players from other mediums though?

yes. we were always surprised on arx just how many people kept coming in that had no MU* experience at all.

tsar

@Trashcan said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

@KarmaBum said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

The only flaw I’ve found is that, if you then change the location using the portal, it keeps the original room desc in the scene info.

I thought this for a long time before discovering that instead of going to ‘Edit Scene’ and changing the value for Location, there is an honest-to-god ‘Change Location’ BUTTON under the ‘Play’ menu.

EXCUSE ME WHAT

Ominous

@Pacha said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

I think another thing to consider is that in the “old” days a lot of the live RP was like…pickup RP. You went somewhere on grid, stuck up your LFG flag and whoever turned up turned up and you sort of just made do with that. This led to a lot of the dreaded Bar RP.

The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more. I can go and read everyone’s hooks, pick out who interests me (and almost as importantly, who I have no interest in) and then just seek to RP with those 5-10 people.

That lends itself to more 1 on 1 private scenes that can very naturally go async as the parties go about their lives, and I find those scenes tend to be more directed and purposeful. I am going to stick with that scene until its finished, rather than just “posing out” of the bar scene when my interest/patience wanes.

I have two problems with that. The first is that it doesn’t allow for relationships and situations to develop organically. Those set up scenes never seem to be “our characters come across one another and strike up a conversation before becoming fast friends a few scenes later.” They always seem to start in media res. And when they do start as “our characters come across each other,” things feel stilted. You’re in a scene with this other person and you have a very specific direction this scene is supposed to go in, “developing some sort of relationship so future scenes can be had with them.” There is no chance that if things seem to be going sideways in the characters’ interactions that you can pose out or ideally shift more of the interactions to other person’s present.

The second problem I have is that it doesn’t leave room for happenstance. You’re not going to have the scene interrupted by someone barging in unannounced and taking the scene into an unexpected direction. This can be a good thing as maybe those already in the scene aren’t up for a detour and shenanigans, but some of my favorite scenes came about because of such incursions.

Also, I am a weirdo who likes BarP.

Clarion

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Those set up scenes never seem to be “our characters come across one another and strike up a conversation before becoming fast friends a few scenes later.”

Those are almost all of my first scenes with people, no matter if the scene itself was pre-arranged. If the characters don’t like each other, that’s potentially fun. If I realize I don’t like playing with the other player, my character can always just leave and we can wrap the scene.

It’s fine if people don’t like these arranged 1:1 scenes, but I’m puzzled at the idea that they don’t allow IC spontaneity or bailing out if something isn’t working.

Faraday

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Those set up scenes never seem to be “our characters come across one another and strike up a conversation before becoming fast friends a few scenes later.” They always seem to start in media res

I’m not disputing your personal experience, but it’s been very different than mine. You don’t have to randomly encounter someone on the grid to have an impromptu scene with them. I can’t count the number of times I’ve set up a 1-on-1 scene with somebody my character didn’t already know and then just had them randomly meeting for the first time ICly. The only difference is the amount of OOC coordination involved.

@Ominous said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

The second problem I have is that it doesn’t leave room for happenstance.

Again, Ares’ scene system just gives you the choice. If you want happenstance, you leave the scene open. Others are free to join. If you don’t, you make the scene private.

Here are just a few of the many different ways you can RP in Ares:

Grid RP: Faraday hangs out in the Gym hoping for someone to come by. When Ominous enters the grid room, Faraday poses doing something. Ominous responds. Yam joins from the web portal. Roadspike wanders into the grid room and joins too.
Off-Grid Client Open RP: Faraday PMs Ominous: “Hey, want to do a scene? Our characters seem to both like basketball, maybe they could meet in the Gym?” We use scene/start to start an off-grid client RP set in the Gym and our characters meet for the first time. Since we left the scene open, Yam can use scene/join to join it. Roadspike can also join from the web portal.
Pickup Web RP: Faraday creates a web scene set in the Gym, leaving it open. Ominous, Roadspike, and Yam all join from either web or client.
Private RP: Faraday and Ominous have a basketball showdown off-grid, set in the Gym, and since it’s private, nobody else can join.

You can still do pickup RP. You can still do random grid RP. You can just ALSO do private RP more easily. Philosophically I just don’t think it’s good to force people to play in ways that they don’t want to for some imagined “good of the game”.

Pavel

@Faraday said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

Philosophically I just don’t think it’s good to force people to play in ways that they don’t want to for some imagined “good of the game”.

One day I am going to make my ShakespeareMU where every pose has to be written in iambic pentameter. Then you’ll see!

RightMeow

While I will always be a grid girl. I’m old. I like my back in my day sort of MU*. I do understand the benefits of web planned scenes too. Especially as we are busy people. We don’t have to type:

ooc - RightMeow stepped away, but they will be back

or hide in private rooms and hear:

OMG RightMeow is always in a TS scene (not that it matters if I want to be as a grown adult). Or RightMeow is not very inclusive.

When I’m really not RPing. I’m idling with random OOC chatter or we are both waiting on a pose 1 an hour or something until we tie up dinner, etc.

Also in web scenes people cannot run away from my massively long and chaos filled scene sets where I will purple prose you to death, I may fall, I may set the place on fire on accident, I might faint across someone’s lap on a dare… you know… normal things. Normal… right?

But I also like just wandering the grid to open places and discovering people and places and things. So… I guess don’t yuck a yum and time is short, enjoy your hobbies how you want?

MisterBoring

I need the grid for my RP to give me something to use to RP off of.

My character is in a world, they are not the world.