@Yam said in Historical Games Round 75:

when you’re down there in the trenches, you see how things unfold in ways that are difficult to predict, and you’re there in the crossfire feeling the heat of just how bad things can get.

Yeah I highlighted a couple instances that stick out in my mind, but it’s been almost 15 years and a lot is hazy. What I remember above all was coming away from the experience thinking: “I love historical settings, but I am NEVER doing this again.”

So I can totally understand the folks who don’t want to deal with that stuff in their pretendy funtime games. I just also have trouble with the idea of sanitizing history. Apart from it breaking my brain because of how interwoven oppression is, it feels dismissive somehow to the oppressed.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

not “we want to do this,” but “If this game was historically accurate, this would happen.”

Oh, no, they 100% were going to do it. Two things stopped it - one was me saying that I wouldn’t stop them trying, but I would not allow them to succeed. I wasn’t going to do anything bad to them, but their efforts would be thwarted. It was just a bridge too far for me. The other was that the players involved got so upset over the situation that they wrote the PCs out of the game, so it became kinda moot.

@Gashlycrumb said in Historical Games Round 75:

I want to hear your war stories.

I liked that game. And RPed some stuff that was about racism. I don’t remember it beng a problem at all. My PC just had some elaborate ghoulish scheme to help hide somebody’s relationship and their child’s parantage. There was some chat about how it wasn’t necessary 'cause the rest of the PCs would be fine with it anyway.

Spoiler alert: They weren’t fine with it (well, not all of them).

For those unfamiliar, the setting was a small town in Wyoming just after the Civil War. There was a whole article on historical plausibility, but the most relevant rule was this (paraphrased for brevity):

This is a historical game, and on-screen portrayal of prejudice is permitted. Staff in no way endorses racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism, but we are not trying to rewrite history. Keep it IC.

Most of the PCs were super tolerant. That was nice in many ways, but it got to the point where:

• Some of the players doing storylines about overcoming prejudice felt kind of gaslighted (like they were overreacting / their struggles weren’t real)
• Some of the players who stuck closer to historical norms felt ostracized (like they themselves were racist)
• It felt jarring any time a NPC acted with historical prejudice.

I got caught in the middle a lot, and it wasn’t fun. The worst situation was when two good players (whom I considered friends) left the game after other PCs threatened to

Spoiler

Were the other PCs acting historically? Yes. Did it suck? Also yes.

There was also tension in how to handle the conflict between settlers and Native Americans respectfully, which made me personally uncomfortable.

The biggest drama was people throwing fits over the number of “exceptional” characters. I approved PCs by looking at their character in its historical context: could that character exist in 1866? Many were bothered by the cognitive dissonance that occurred when you had all these exceptional characters together in this small town. But I wasn’t about to say yes to a female ranchhand but then turn around and say no to a Black doctor because we’d met some arbitrary quota of folks who didn’t adhere to historical norms. Some likened it to Twin Peaks 1866, and I was ok with that. Others weren’t.

@Pyrephox said in Historical Games Round 75:

But these societal forces shaped the era and had a lot of impact on the culture, the structure of society, and the pressures that drove people to accomplish amazing and heartbreaking things. When you remove, for example, the fact that suffragettes could be and were tortured and murdered by law enforcement for campaigning for women’s rights, then the courage it took to be a suffragette is diminished. If you’re talking about union-building, I think you have to include the fact that union-busters used racism to try and drive working class groups apart, even if that effort fails in the context of your game. If you’re talking 1920s-30s, it’s a bit repugnant to me to not make it clear that it’s an era when the people who made some of the defining music of the era couldn’t have a drink in the “respectable” clubs they played in. It also helps contrast some of the speakeasys which were integrated and even havens for LGBT folk of the era, etc. The fact that people had to find refuge in criminality because the laws were bigoted and unjust is a huge part of the story of the era.

This exactly. It’s not that I WANT to see -isms in my RP. They’re just interwoven into society to such a degree that I cannot separate them from the time period.

You want to do alt history and show how history diverged? Cool.

You want to do a sci-fi / fantasy setting cosplaying as a historical time period? Cool - though I think Firefly demonstrated that even this can land problematically.

You want to say: “We acknowledge that these things exist in the real world but they are not the focus here so here are some boundaries”? Also cool, but tricky.

But if you’re going with: “It’s the 1920s but all prejudice has been solved” I’m just gonna be like…

@Ashkuri said in Historical Games Round 75:

@Gashlycrumb said in Missed Settings:

Really, Westerns seem like a very easy setting to run.

There are a few historical -isms to navigate in those

Having run a western game, this is the understatement of the century.

Also I stink at formatting today apparently.

@KDraygo said in Your first game?:

If I recall correctly, I got into MUSHing in the mid to late 90s and my first game was SW1. This kicked off because I had finished reading the Heir to the Empire Trilogy (Thrawn trilogy) and I started reading more post movies Star Wars novels.

Same! My buddy in college recruited me to SW1. That was where I learned to MUSHcode, making some stupid datapad object or something.

I also loved Robotech. I was re-watching it recently with my kids and realizing how much my interest in post-apocalyptic settings started so early with Robotech and Battlestar.

Battlestar Galactica (the original 1990’s version). though I was only there briefly. The flight sims and immersive code systems weren’t my jam, even back then. The game that really got me into MUs was Maddock (consent-based wild west game).

@Yam said in Character Death:

Curious if anyone has actually seen a PC death play out where the player certainly didn’t intend to die AND didn’t consent to being in a situation that warned the risk.

It depends on what you mean by “consent to”.

The first PC I lost was on a (very old) Star Wars game where they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and rolled poorly on an Athletics check. On another SW game, my character was sniped in the town square by a bounty hunter acting on a dubiously-initiated bounty. My PC didn’t die, but easily could have. On TGG, I generally played non-combatants, but one time my nurse char was killed because I forgot to +takecover before going AFK and the (usually safe) base got shelled by artillery.

One can argue that just by playing on a game with the possibility of PC death I was implicitly consenting to whatever came my way. That’s fair. But I certainly didn’t enter into any of those scenes thinking it at all likely my character was at risk.

@somasatori said in PyReach:

For real, @Tez is right and a lot of very simple things we take for granted in Rhost/Ares/Tiny/Penn is not included in base Evennia. Mail, for example, is handled via contrib file, page is a custom thing, etc.

That’s true, but I will say that same lack of built-in features offers tremendous flexibility, and is why I steer folks to Evennia for super custom projects.

When you come into things with the pre-baked idea of what a MU should have, as Ares and (to a lesser extent) the Penn/Rhost/Tiny family, it makes it difficult to depart from those paradigms. Just think of all the drama caused by built-in commands vs +commands over the years.

Everything being a plugin/contrib isn’t necessarily bad, because it can lead to developers who focus on making a really good (insert system here). Just think of how Myrddin’s BBS or Anomaly’s jobs or Theno’s WoD were de-facto standards in Penn/Tiny even though they weren’t baked in.

In the early Ares designs, everything was intended to be a plugin to offer that same degree of flexibility. But I quickly realized that there are a LOT of dependencies across systems. Far more than I anticipated. To make everything work together seamlessly out of the box, which is Ares’ main “selling” point, the code has to be very “opinionated” about how things should be done.

Everything is a tradeoff.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think after reading a lot of stuff in this thread, I realize that I don’t necessarily want characters to die, I want characters to have their story end.

Dang, I have the opposite problem in MUs. I have a hard enough time getting my characters’ story arcs to a meaningful conclusion, let alone to bring the entire character to a nice ending.

There are exceptions of course. BSP ended in a way that gave everyone a chance to wrap things up and write epilogues. That was nice. TGG’s campaigns had fixed endings, so we could bring things to a natural conclusion.

@Pavel said in Character Death:

I do. They very rarely appear, and when they do, there’s no guarantee it’ll matter.

Good point. Also, it fundamentally prevents me from doing anything else with that character, which as I said above - is pretty much the whole reason I’m there.

I liken it to how ensemble TV shows rarely kill off their main leads. Occasionally they’ll do it as a shocking twist or something, but mostly they only do it when people leave the show. I realize there are those who prefer the Game of Thrones model where nobody’s safe. They like feeling like the characters are in real peril. It makes the show feel more gritty since the main chars aren’t protected by plot armor.

And to be clear - there’s nothing wrong with liking that. I’m not trying to wrongfun anyone. All I want is a little non-judgemental understanding that there are those of us who get attached to characters - both in TV and in MUs - and who don’t like having to get invested all over again when they get bumped off randomly.

@Pyrephox @catzilla Don’t feel bad. Coding is hard. Trying to jump into coding by making a CoD plugin (or worse, trying to get somebody’s else’s half-built one to work) is like trying to learn to play the piano by jumping right into a Mozart concerto. It’s frustrating to have to start with the code equivalent of Hot Cross Buns and work your way up, when all you want is to get a game going.

@MisterBoring said in Character Death:

I think it’s odd when people say MUs aren’t TTRPGs, but I could take the rules of almost any MU, print them out and run a tabletop group with them.

You can play TT with literally any rules or no rules (diceless/freeform) though. Many TT systems are adapted to LARPs too. So yes, they are mostly offshoots of the same family tree, but they are all very different experiences IMHO.

@somasatori said in Character Death:

suppose, to me anyway, if you are playing in a game that’s attempting to emulate a TTRPG, regardless of which one, there should be some expectation of character death. Playing D&D, it’s expected that you might die (though admittedly there are many ways to offset that through resurrection and raise dead spells) pretty early on considering low HP.

I don’t come to MUs to emulate a TTRPG experience, but even if I did, I don’t see the association between TTRPGs and PC death that you do. As @Pavel also pointed out, different games have different expectations. I’ve been in plenty of TTRPG campaigns through the decades, from games with my family, to various clubs, to games amongst strangers at Gencon. In all that time, there were exactly two campaigns where PC death was expected. Naturally some of that is selection bias in terms of what RPGs I play and who I play with, but it wasn’t exactly hard to find like-minded people who just want to chill and tell a story.

@Roz said in Character Death:

I wasn’t on The Greatest Generation, but my impression of how people have talked about it really points at the expectation aspect to me. People went in knowing their characters were almost surely going to die. That was, from everything I’ve heard, kind of core to the game’s conceit: there were limited-time campaigns, and PCs would die. When players expect to lose their characters, it reframes our entire approach.

This exactly. It’s like playing the Paranoia RPG. It’s right there on the tin that you should expect your PC to die. I might still be able to play and have fun with my friends, because at least I know what I’m getting into.

More importantly though, it’s a different kind of fun. In MUs, I’m in it for the soap opera. I want the long-term stories. I couldn’t care less how quick and easy the chargen process is, or whether I get to carry over the XP to my new character, or whatever other “compensation” you try to give me for losing my character. All of that is irrelevant because unwanted/unexpected character death is the equivalent of flipping over the chess board in a middle of a match.

I’m not saying games with PC death shouldn’t exist. To each their own. It’s just not for me because it’s undermining the very reason I’m playing the games in the first place.

@Yam said in Factions:

Where have you seen this done elegantly?
Is it a fundamentally flawed approach in modern MUSHing?
Can it be managed in a properly collaborative environment? Does it depend on a carefully curated playerbase?

In order: Never. Yes. Theoretically, but short of playing online TT with a few friends who already know each other, I have no idea how you could possibly accomplish this on an actual game.

PVP just means Player against Player. It doesn’t imply death, or even serious consequences. I’ve seen players flip the heck out over their character being mildly embarrassed by IC pranks on a PVE game, or get bent out of shape because their PC came second in a contest with no tangible IC consequences. Everything I’ve experienced in decades of MU gaming has convinced that random strangers on the internet cannot constructively handle meaningful PVP conflict.

Can it be done without burning the game down? Sure, but I’d still expect a ton of drama.

@Jennkryst said in Marvel Multiverse Web Portal Stuff:

This was on my shortlist of ‘lets ask ChatGPT to code this for me,’ so now there is less of an excuse to avoid trying to run the thing…

Asking ChatGPT to write code in an obscure JS framework (Ember) for an obscure app framework (Ares) is destined to end in tears. Just do the Ares coding tutorials and ask me (via discord/forum/etc.) if you have questions. It’ll turn out far better, I promise.

Back on topic - neat interface.

@somasatori said in Minigames in MUSHes:

1. 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.

@Gashlycrumb said in Minigames in MUSHes:

I never found the pool tables and stuff tedious. Some spewed more text than one would want, though, and I can see preferring to use fewer, simpler rolls. The decks of cards seem dated, since you can now use a web-based virtual deck of cards simultaneously with RPing.

Yeah, I mean, I’m not wrongfunning anybody who enjoyed them. More power to you.

For me, it was just a matter of goals. When I MU, I’m there to tell stories. If my char is playing poker with their bestie, I don’t actually care how the poker game went. I don’t personally enjoy poker. The poker game / basketball game / whatever is just a background thing for the actual connections between the characters. The code just got in the way. Similarly, if I’m in the zombie game @Jenn described, I’d like to be able to just RP getting some supplies—or NOT getting them, if that befits the story. I don’t want to be constrained in my storytelling by what the code says. (There are situations where constraints are necessary to prevent powerplaying, resolve disputes, etc. but I prefer those guardrails to be minimal.) But then I don’t mind minigames in a MMO, because I’m there more for achievement/progression/questing stuff, and it feels less invasive. It’s just a matter of preference.

@MisterBoring said in Minigames in MUSHes:

I’m guessing this was prior to the creation of Mechwarrior: Destiny?

Yes, but long after the creation of the original Mechwarrior RPG (1986). They just wanted a text-based battle sim, not a RP MU.

@Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes:

Out of curiosity, and totally not born from the fact that I’m newer to MUSHing but also love the idea of programming in a bunch of mini games…what sort of examples of minigames have you guys seen or imagined?

1. Minigames that support the overall theme, often larger systems like crafting and economics. The 90’s had a fair number of space games where you’d sit at a virtual ship console, adjusting course to run cargo from planet A to planet B to make money. Some fantasy games had crafting commands where you could make weapons and such. One could also imagine using +commands to manage your farm animals (dunno if Firan had that). One cyberpunk game had a scavenging minigame.
2. Little things that support RP, like a coded card game so you could play along while your characters were playing - placing bets and trading cards. Or a hunger mechanic so when you were RPing at the bar you’d actually want to +buy and +eat something.
3. Systems to pass the time OOCly, like a jukebox in the OOC area or a slot machine that spit out random nonsense.

Once the initial novelty wore off, I never liked these kinds of systems much. They either got in the way of creativity, or were annoyingly tedious, or both.

@sao said in RPing with Everybody (or not):

@Gashlycrumb I disagree. Players playing in small groups can’t bottleneck story if staff is attentive to how story is seeded. This is not a player problem. If your IC leadership structure has the ability to prevent OOC story access, your game is not functioning correctly.

This exactly. People playing amongst themselves CAN bottleneck story if you let it, but it’s not that hard to design the story in such a way that it doesn’t. If Anne, Bob and Cathy only like to RP amongst themselves, don’t give them the McGuffin that Dave is going to need to propel the story forward. That doesn’t mean that the ABC club can’t make their own stories, or can’t contribute to other stories in their own way.