@helvetica said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine Logs are publicly available, their placement on the site just isn’t in a very obvious location.

I think their custom portal has a bug actually, because the “Recent” view on scene logs was initially blank for me. Once I switched it to “all” and back to “recent” it behaved itself. That might lead one to honestly believe there were no public logs.

But it’s oh-so-pretty. Seriously. Kudos for the aesthetics.

@Roz said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

True to its name, I’ve seen nothing but war and strife from ARES.

I mean, Ares is just a codebase, it doesn’t really have any influence on whether or not there’s drama on a MU*.

Whatever do you mean? I’m quite certain it’s the first and only MU codebase to ever see drama. I designed it special that way.

@tsar said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Man, thank you. Because this vague insinuation that Director bailed and crushed all these people’s hopes and dreams of stories really started to get my blood pressure up. He’s a really cool dude, who is engaging, funny, and a great time.

I don’t know Director from Adam, but even if they did completely bail, so what?

Staff are volunteers, and players are not entitled to anything from them that they are unwilling to give.

If they open a game and close it the very next day because some horrible experience caused them to reconsider the whole thing? That’s their prerogative. If they open a game and close it the very next week because RL got too hard? That’s their business.

Yes, it’s disappointing when games close. But guess what - even running YOUR OWN GAME doesn’t mean you’ll get a chance to finish the stories you imagined telling. Enjoy it while it lasts.

@GF said in New Concept:

if you can’t suspend your disbelief for less prejudice but can for God being a space squid who hates you, then maybe sit with that and really think about it.

If it’s a fictional setting? I absolutely can suspend my disbelief for that. But history is established. Someone (sorry can’t find the quote) mentioned “it’s just the 1920s but without discrimination.”

I don’t know what that means.

I’m not being snarky. I hate discrimination with a burning passion in RL, and I fully respect someone not wanting to deal with that in their pretendy funtimes.

The problem is that discrimination is so deeply baked into societal systems that it’s just not as simple to me as snapping your fingers and saying it doesn’t exist.

Everyone always points to Wild West settings and says: “If you can imagine a world where the PCs don’t die of dysentery, why can’t you imagine a world without discrimination?”

Easy. You’re not pretending dysentery doesn’t exist, you’re just saying the PCs are lucky enough to not contract it, or to contract it and survive – both of which actually happened.

“A world without discrimination” is just not the same thing. How did it get that way? Let’s start from that Wild West setting…if racism isn’t a thing, then logically slavery wouldn’t have been. There wouldn’t have been a Civil War (or it would have gone very differently). Heck, the entire economic basis of the south would probably be dramatically different. Oh and would America even exist at all if not for the genocide against the native peoples? How far back do we go with this?

If you want to do alt-history, that’s cool. That’s what Savage Skies did. They picked a divergence point (something about “when dragons appeared” IIRC) and then wrote the history from that point forward to explain why their imaginary world is different from our real world. It’s a bunch more work, but it addresses the issue cleanly.

Less clean is “racism exists but we don’t want stories about it here” because of systemic discrimination. What about the laws of the land? What about PCs who have discrimination in their backstories? It gets thorny.

I’m not telling people how they should RP. I just wish people would stop ascribing evil motivations to those of us who just have a hard time imagining a historical setting as an egalitarian utopia.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.

There have been Star Wars MUs where people play members/supporters of the literal fascist Empire; Wild West games where people play racists, outlaws, and robber barons; supernatural games where people play vampires and werewolves; and modern-day games where, indeed, people play super-rich elites.

This fixation that fantasy settings are bad and other genres are good seems weirdly out of step with what people actually do in those other settings.

People point to the staff tools and FS3 design in Ares as like: “This enables folks to run games with fewer staff,” and while that’s true, it’s backwards. Ares and FS3 were designed the way they are because games, including my own, were having trouble finding and keeping staff.

I personally experienced too many cases of staff blowups or abandonment through the years, some of which harmed relationships with friends. So for the last decade or so, I run games myself. That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games. ETA: Also with de-centralized storytelling like @L-B-Heuschkel described.

@doodletilidie Be aware that if you allow players under 18 you’re subjecting yourself to the COPAA laws. Additionally, you may be opening yourself up to liability if you allow R-rated content on a wiki that is geared towards 13-year-olds (per your NSFW policy) or by allowing mature RP at all without the players involved having any means to verify the age of the people they’re playing with. Big can of worms. Don’t recommend.

ETA: COPAA is specifically for under-13 but other regional laws may still apply for under-18s, especially European players. Still don’t recommend.

@Kestrel That’s very interesting. I only skimmed the thread, so maybe I missed something, but I wouldn’t consider their attitude “disdain” so much as a different emphasis.

We want people to be able to emote with each other while focusing on one thing at a time, not doing that awkward thing that plagues MUSHes where you end up addressing five people in a single emote and having five conversations at the same time.
…
What we’re trying to do here is provide an immersive atmosphere for a playstyle that resembles improv acting more than collaborative writing. It’s difficult and jarring to immersion when these two styles clash.

Much as I enjoy MU RP, they’ve got a valid point, don’t they? I’ve literally had 1-on-1 MU scenes where there are three different conversation threads going simultaneously between the same two characters. Traditional MU paragraph style resembles neither organic character interaction nor normal creative writing.

TGG, for instance, had shorter poses during action scenes by the necessity of the code. Storytelling still occurred within those constraints.

Like they said, these are styles. Neither intrinsically better or worse than the other, but each having pros and cons. At least they’re up front about it and setting expectations about what they’re going for.

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…

That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.

It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

Ares was designed with privacy and safety in mind. The full privacy policy is at https://aresmush.com/game_privacy.html but I’ll summarize here.

It’s important to draw a distinction between logged and stored data.

Logs are plain-text files, accessible by any admin to track and troubleshoot what happens on the game. Certain commands are not logged for privacy reasons: connect/create (due to passwords), mails, pages/pms, poses, oocs, channel chat, and others.

2023-01-30 17:31:36 INFO - Character Connected: Faraday 127.0.0.1 localhost 
2023-01-30 17:31:37 DEBUG - AresMUSH::Jobs::JobsFilterCmd: ID=1 Enactor=Faraday Cmd=job/filter mine 
2023-01-30 17:31:38 DEBUG - AresMUSH::Who::WhoCmd: ID=1 Enactor=Faraday Cmd=who 

Stored data (in the database) is for the purpose of game features. This enables things like the web portal play screen, channel recall, sharing scenes on the wiki, etc. All built-in commands limit stored data to people who should have access to it. Game admin do not have ready access to everything. Not even headwiz.

• Pages/PMs can only be viewed by the people chatting.
• Private scene poses/ooc chat can only be viewed by the participants.
• Mail messages can only be viewed by the recipients.
• etc.

Pages, scenes, channels and mail all have built-in commands/buttons for a participating player to report offensive behavior with a verified, unalterable record attached.

Now it’s worth noting that even though Ares doesn’t give admins snooping commands–with ANY online service, ANY data transmitted to the server and/or stored in the database is ultimately accessible to the game owner and anyone they choose to share it with. Game owners/coders could install custom loggers or custom commands, or crack open the database manually. Sensitive information is best kept off-game, Ares or otherwise.

@Mr-Johnson said in Good Systems to use in 2024?:

@Roz Did that get more optimized or is it still really difficult to keep up with larger playerbases for decent price?

Depends on what you consider a decent price. The 2GB droplet (currently $12/month) runs most games just fine. If you’ve got tons of players or run long enough to rack up thousands of scenes, you might at some point need to bump it up to the next bigger size. But really even that is not much by web server standards, especially when you consider that Ares is running a full-service web application, a regular database, and a game engine that needs to respond to commands near-instantaneously.

It requires more horsepower than a traditional MU server because it does a lot more.

Evennia’s good too, but I don’t think it has everything you need code-wise out of the box. I think it’s pretty comparable for hosting cost.

Rhost + Volund’s MUSHCode utils is also a fine choice if you want something simpler / traditional. Also the hosting would be cheaper since you can do shared hosting.

@Pavel said in Ares questions!:

You could probably get away with just not giving the MU details out and getting people using the portal instead.

That would require custom code, since the game has the address emblazoned on the home screen and it has the web client as well.

There’s really no reason to, though, since players can play together equally whether they’re connected via a MU Client or the portal. Sometimes games do web-only or client-only systems (like chargen) but in general it doesn’t matter how you connect.

@catzilla said in Ares questions!:

Since I can’t get the forums on the Ares site to work for me, I’ll ask here!

If you want to DM me with the details of the problem you’re having, I can try to help you get that sorted out. You just need to create an AresCentral account and then you should be able to log in.

@icanbeyourmuse said in Installing Arxcode?:

All items need to be added via the admin panel on the website. So, players can’t really use it as something to craft without putting in a request for their cool item to be added

Very true, but that’s still a potentially viable option.

There’s all kinds of potential implementations here, from total honor system, to a +request driven inventory system, to a full-fledged crafting system. You could also do a hybrid, like extending simpleinventory or the existing desc plugin without going full-bore crafting code.

@bear_necessities said in Installing Arxcode?:

I play 99.5% through the portal, never look at people’s descs, and would have no idea if they had pretty colored clothes or not.

You can still see peoples’ descs on the portal, but I don’t know how many actually care to look.
(Though from my adesc, I’m not sure how many bother to look in-client either. YMMV.)

@Cobalt said in Installing Arxcode?:

On Arx there was an inventory and wear system, where you would in came craft pieces of clothing and then wear them and they’d be displayed on your desc when someone looked at you. And you could color them with 256 ansi colors.

I never played Arx but I’m vaguely familiar with the system. The colors are supported, but if you wanted to restrict who could use them in a desc that would definitely require custom code. Or you could adopt the Simple Inventory plugin to track “crafted” items and do it on the honor system.

@Tez said in Installing Arxcode?:

I’m just saying the tutorial fails to address a number of things, unfortunately, around versions.

It’s just geared more towards people who are already developers (especially Python), while Ares is geared towards people who are not developers at all. It’s a tradeoff of flexibility (Evennia can run pretty much anywhere, and let’s you build a lot more varied games) vs. simplicity (Ares is designed for a specific environment and is more of a pre-built LEGO castle rather than a pile of bricks).

@Cobalt said in Installing Arxcode?:

I want pretty clothing ansi colors

I don’t know specifically what you’re after, but you can modify the ‘describe’ plugin with custom code templates in Ares.

That said, Evennia is definitely the preferred option for really immersive systems.

You’re trying the tutorial here? https://www.evennia.com/docs/latest/Howtos/Beginner-Tutorial/Beginner-Tutorial-Overview.html

@dvoraen said in [BeipMU] Removing pose order spam from Ares games.:

I forget how Ares sends poses to players on a client, since it’s been a while for me. If the first character is literally < (i.e., only the pose is sent and not a nospoof like the PC who sent the pose) then it will happen as I’ve outlined.

Also if someone does a <OOC> Faraday waves. or FS3 combat messages, which are prefixed by <FS3Combat> Faraday is knocked out. or ASCII art, or any paragraph that starts with < for some reason.

Really specific channel names is the safer way to go.

@Roz said in [BeipMU] Removing pose order spam from Ares games.:

Or if it’s a reasonable number of channels, I’d probably just set it up with the actual channel names.

That’s what I’ve always done. Angle brackets was the standard on PennMUSH for channels so it was necessary to distinguish channels from OOC and such.

@Testament said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

I don’t know if ADHD falls into some kind of spectrum or not. She was willing to say that there was something to read into it. Or at least enough to prescribe me medication for it?

ADHD is not a “spectrum” per se, but it does have three distinct subtypes with subtly different presentations. How to ADHD has a good explainer on the differences (also a great channel overall for understanding ADHD and how to work with it). I’m not suggesting you try to diagnose yourself from it, but learning more about it may help give you vocabulary to understand what your provider is saying and ask the right questions.

@Testament said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

She just said “it used to be called ADD” when I stared at her blankly after she first told me.
I actually think she said Predominantly Inattentive, now that I’m reading that again.

That would make sense. The diagnoses previously categorized as ADD are now under ADHD (inattentive or combined subtypes).

It was just odd that if said they “ruled out ADHD” but then diagnosed you with ADHD