There’s now MUSHclient portrait support. Players using the Paroxysm portrait plugin can now have portrait view display the character’s image in a temporary panel on the right side of the client. The portrait disappears again after 10 seconds. May expand this to items, later.

@somasatori said:

@Shygaming said:
Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.

Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.

I get what you’re saying. However, given that there are bad actors who have attempted to masquerade as other people in this hobby for years, and who will often use the same language about privacy to justify said masquerade, I think one is liable to be a bit suspicious, no? Fool me once and all that.

I do not care. I am rapidly beginning to understand why Tyr barely spoke to anyone.

Nobody has asked me anything about the game. It feels like people are far more interested in the possibility that there is some scandal to uncover or in repeatedly telling me they disagree with a design decision than they are in Paroxysm itself. Nobody seems particularly curious about the systems, the setting, the direction, or what I am actually trying to build. The only things generating sustained interest seem to be who I might have been on some other game years ago and whether there is some design decision people disagree with strongly enough that we can spend another three pages telling me they disagree with it after I have already acknowledged that they do.

The code is open source partly because I sincerely hope somebody eventually forks it into the hugbox version of the game. Then they can have that and I can keep making the game I actually want to make without having this same argument until the heat death of the universe.

That is why I am finding this whole conversation increasingly difficult to care about. If people want to talk about Paroxysm, I am happy to talk about Paroxysm. If the real attraction here is trying to unmask me, reconstruct some ancient hobby drama, or repeatedly relitigate design decisions because my answer did not change after the first three times, I genuinely have nothing useful to contribute to that.

I’m going to take a break before this thread gets split into a fourth thread.

I wish I’d gone for a walk before posting that. I posted it out of anger and I don’t think it was a particularly useful contribution.

Anyway. Yeah. I can see this probably isn’t my crowd and I don’t think continuing to argue about it is doing anyone much good.

I’m going to leave the thread here and get back to working on the game. I’ll be in discord if anyone wants to talk about it.

@somasatori said:

I dunno man. I feel like that whole “people deserve second chances/people deserve not to be burdened with who they were in the past” lingo in the year of our lord 2026 is absolutely a smokescreen for shady and shitty behavior. I personally agree that people sometimes deserve second chances and shouldn’t be associated with past actions so long as they own up to those actions and seek to effectively make amends for said actions as best they can. Often when people use the kind of language that they’re uncomfortable mentioning who they were, my immediate assumption is a) they did something awful or abusive; b) they have not addressed it; and c) they have no interest in addressing it.

Obviously some people have a personal safety reason for not mentioning who they were, but I feel like that’s an easy enough thing to say without weasel words around “digital footprints.” Maybe just me tho. I wasn’t on Haven and therefore have no dog in this here race.

CITIZEN COMMENDATION NOTICE

The Cortex recognizes @somasatori for demonstrating appropriate suspicion toward citizens with unexplained privacy. Such instincts are the foundation of a safe society.

Remember: a citizen with nothing to hide has nothing to redact.

Your diligence has been noted, Loyal Citizen.

This is probably where I’m going to bow out because, yeah, you’re right about the fundamental disagreement.

What I’m going for isn’t really collaborative storytelling in the sense you’re describing. I don’t want every major outcome negotiated between the players involved. I want a game where the world, the mechanics and other characters can impose outcomes on you that you didn’t choose.

That is not going to be for everyone. I completely accept that.

I think collaborative RP where everyone is making sure everyone else gets the kind of story they want can be lovely. It just isn’t the experience I’m trying to build.

@Kestrel said:

@Shygaming said:

@Kestrel said:

@Shygaming said:

And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.

This has to be one of the most buckwild paragraphs I’ve ever read on any RP forum. I’m actually more weirded out by this than the opinions on SA stuff which is very much not my kink.

Why do you want people’s experience of a hobby to be bad?

Seek help.

A story can only really work when characters are allowed to react to things in believable ways.

I don’t want the player’s experience to be bad. I want characters to sometimes have bad experiences because conflict and adversity are what make stories interesting.

Can you imagine how compelling The Handmaid’s Tale would have been if all the women were actually into what was happening to them? If everyone in Gilead had enthusiastically consented then you have not made the story safer. You have removed the entire point of the story.

I play antagonists all the time. The scenario where everyone is having fun and enjoying the story, even as their characters are screaming, is absolutely the ideal. That’s my dopamine hit, knowing how much fun everyone is having and that I could facilitate that. What enjoyment do you derive out of knowing your fellow players aren’t having fun?

I think we’re just looking for different things from RP. I don’t want wish fulfillment where everyone gets the scenes and outcomes they were hoping for. I want uncertainty, conflict and consequences. That lack of control is part of what makes the story feel real to me. This is probably not something I’m going to change anyone’s mind on. I think we’re starting from fundamentally different ideas of what RP should be.

@Kestrel said:

@Shygaming said:

And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.

This has to be one of the most buckwild paragraphs I’ve ever read on any RP forum. I’m actually more weirded out by this than the opinions on SA stuff which is very much not my kink.

Why do you want people’s experience of a hobby to be bad?

Seek help.

A story can only really work when characters are allowed to react to things in believable ways.

I don’t want the player’s experience to be bad. I want characters to sometimes have bad experiences because conflict and adversity are what make stories interesting.

Can you imagine how compelling The Handmaid’s Tale would have been if all the women were actually secretly into what was happening to them? If everyone in Gilead had enthusiastically consented then you have not made the story safer. You have removed the entire point of the story.

The same is true more broadly. A kidnapping story where the hostage wants to be kidnapped is not really a kidnapping story. A horror story where the victim wants to be hunted is something else entirely. A dystopia where everyone genuinely enjoys being oppressed has lost the thing that made it dystopian.

I wasn’t going to say anything in this thread but this is basically why I think SA has to either be banned or freely allowed.

The middle ground where it is technically possible but only if the victim OOCly opts into it turns it into CNC fetish play almost by definition. At that point the “evil rapist” isn’t actually imposing something horrible on another character. The two players have negotiated a rape fantasy together.

And I’ve seen that dynamic poison games before. I genuinely cannot count how many times I’ve seen some supposedly awful villain doing horrific things to another character while everyone involved OOC is having a wonderful time and the “victim” is actively helping arrange it. It stops functioning as an unpleasant consequence of living in a horrible setting and starts functioning as content being provided for people who want that content.

That is actually one of the reasons I don’t want a preference flag for it in Paroxysm. If I wanted to facilitate CNC RP then an opt in system would make perfect sense. I don’t.

That also doesn’t mean someone has to sit there and explicitly RP an assault they don’t want to write. Fade to black exists. You can draw boundaries around what has to be depicted without making whether the event itself can happen dependent on whether somebody finds the scenario appealing OOC.

I completely understand the argument for banning SA outright. I think that is a coherent policy. I also understand allowing it as part of a setting where players know what they are signing up for.

I just think “SA is allowed but only when everyone involved wants SA RP” produces something very different from either of those things.

So we’ve early deployed NPCs. The long term intention is to make them an actual part of the game’s resource loops rather than relying on offscreen assumptions. Eventually vampires will need to hunt NPCs for blood. Demonborn will need to torture them to maintain high Sadism and its associated buffs.

Cortex also has a monthly citizen arrest quota while being required to keep civilian deaths below a certain limit. So there should be some actual tension between enforcing the regime and simply turning the city into a corpse pile.

@Pavel said:

So whenever someone says that they’re not worried about the extremes when it comes to MUing, you can remind them that Haven existed and enough people thought it was neat for long enough that it’s getting a spiritual successor.

People generally do not take on a massive unpaid second job as hobbyist developers unless the thing they actually want to play cannot be found somewhere else. If there were more roleplay focused games with a genuinely competitive focus I absolutely would not be putting this amount of effort into Paroxysm. I would just go and play one of them.

So I would not really take the existence of successors as evidence that people thought everything about Haven was great. Sometimes it just means there were parts of the game people genuinely liked and nobody else is making anything that scratches the same itch.

I also think people pleasers usually make terrible hobbyist developers. If you are constantly compromising your vision to try to keep everyone happy then eventually you stop making an actual game and end up with a chatroom that has some mechanics bolted onto the side.

I’m not going to play defense squad for anyone here. But I do think Tyr left the hobby in a better state than he found it.

Whatever criticisms people have of him personally or of the direction Haven took over the years. The codebase itself is an incredible starting point for anyone wanting to build their own project. It represents years of work and an enormous amount of his life. People can now build things that otherwise might have taken years just to get off the ground.

I think that deserves some acknowledgement.

So there’s been a recent optimisation pass on operations. Amazingly the game can now run them on a shitty £5 a month server without crashing or noticeably lagging.

People in cover also now show as underscored. I kind of want to eventually make character initials display in brackets on the map too so you can immediately tell who is where. There are still some bugs around operations and I’m working through them. But considering the state the code was in on the public release I think this is a pretty solid step in the right direction.

Do you want to talk about Paroxysm or do you want to keep talking about sexual assault?

If it is the latter then that is fine but I am probably going to dip out and leave you guys to it. I have explained my position and I do not think repeating the same discussion over and over is going to add much. I understand that people disagree with the decision and I am not expecting to change anyone’s mind about it.

Anyway. I want to show off a few things I have been working on.

None of this has been pushed to the live server yet because it still needs a bit more polish on localhost. But I do want to make it clear that development is moving quickly and there are a lot of genuinely exciting new systems and features being added behind the scenes.

@dvoraen said:

@Shygaming said:

I completely understand that this will be a deal breaker for some people. I am sorry to lose anyone over it. I would still rather be upfront about what the game allows than have somebody discover it after investing time into a character. Nobody will ever be forced to roleplay anything they are uncomfortable with and players will always have the option to fade to black.

How is the bolded an opt-out in any way shape or form if the ftb insinuates that it happened to that character anyway, meaning the topic is likely coming up later which means they’re… still roleplaying about it? Because let’s be real, I don’t know of anyone who can just black hole memory that kind of event to the point it doesn’t become relevant later in any form. (Ignoring supernatural things being involved, obviously.)

I might have worded that poorly.

What I mean is that nobody would be required to actually emote through a scene they are uncomfortable with. They could fade to black rather than roleplay the act itself.

You are right that this does not mean the event simply disappears from the character’s history. The consequences would still exist and could still matter afterwards.

If anything that is probably my preferred way for this sort of content to be handled. I would much rather the focus be on the narrative consequences and what it does to the characters involved than on playing out the act itself.

Just to answer some of the questions that were asked:

Did I play Haven? Yes.

Am I willing to say who I played? No. I generally think leaving a digital footprint that lets strangers connect accounts and identities across different parts of the internet is a bad idea. That is not specific to Haven or this community. It is simply how I approach being online.

Do I have any relationship with previous Haven staff? No.

Am I keeping sexual assault as something that can happen in the game? Yes.

I am trying to steer Paroxysm away from obviously kinky content because I do not want that to become the tone of the game. At the same time I think difficult subject matter can have a place in a dark setting when it is being used as part of the story rather than treated as fetish content.

I think allowing that kind of material adds more to the setting than removing it entirely. It can create serious consequences. It can create grudges and conflict between characters. It can also make the world feel genuinely unpleasant in places which is appropriate for the sort of setting I am trying to build.

I completely understand that this will be a deal breaker for some people. I am sorry to lose anyone over it. I would still rather be upfront about what the game allows than have somebody discover it after investing time into a character. Nobody will ever be forced to roleplay anything they are uncomfortable with and players will always have the option to fade to black.

Is this a haven clone? It uses the Haven codebase so there is obviously going to be some shared DNA. That does not mean the goal is to recreate Haven. The audience I am mainly trying to attract is closer to the Armageddon MUD and Sindome crowd. The long term vision is a difficult survival focused and competitive game. That will not appeal to everyone and I am completely fine with that. I would rather build something with a clear identity for the people who enjoy that kind of game than try to make Paroxysm appeal to everyone.

@Wizz said:

this is probably not the best place to advertise or engage given our generally intense distaste for both Haven and LLMs amd the fact you’re already bobbing and weaving around some direct questions, just sayin’.

I’m keeping this thread focused on the advertisement rather than turning it into a general argument about Haven, LLMs, or unrelated grievances. If the game isn’t for you, that’s completely fine, but please stop derailing the thread.

I made this thread for you. I hope it helps. https://brandmu.day/topic/690/paroxysm-split-off

Talk about your grudges from ten years ago, hatred for LLMs, or coded menstrual cycles here.

The website is up now. It’s still an early draft and I’ll be working on it more over time. But I’m pretty happy with where it’s at so far.

And yes. I used LLMs to help: https://paroxysmrpg.com

@NotSanni said:

At a glance, this does just mostly look like Haven, with someone starting to file off the serial numbers. The game still references Haven multiple times, there’s still the frankly kind of weird sex code (I didn’t check to see if there was still hard coded S.A., but I can only assume).

I think calling it “early alpha” is a bit of a misnomer, and if this intends to be in any way, shape, or form different from the game who’s engine you’re using, you should probably take more care to make more changes to differentiate it before saying it’s “online and playable”, given the history and reputation that precedes Haven.

Hey. Thanks for taking a look.

A lot of the work so far has been under the hood. We’ve done quite a bit of combat optimisation and set up ingame commands to do deployment from Git to make development and testing much easier. The Git is public too if you want to have a look:

https://github.com/ParoxysmRPG/Paroxysm

To give you an idea of some of the bigger gameplay changes:

• The game now has an asymmetrical focus. There is one global Cortex faction against a coalition of player created societies.
• Alliance code is reenabled. There are 2 alliances rather than 3 with worshipping or opposing Higher Powers being entirely optional.
• Territories give you bonuses for owning them.
• Karma has been removed. You can earn enough personal karma for a T3 through roleplay.
• T4s and T5s are earned through successful monster play or by succeeding as a Higher Power. Higher Powers are now guest characters and need a worshipping society that has done enough to help them ascend.
• Too many T4s+ will disable Sanctuary for everyone until there’s an acceptable number of them. This is automated.
• Sanctuary has been significantly nerfed. It still prevents things like imprint locking and sexual assault. Murder and maiming can happen through it now though. You respawn afterwards and your society pays for it.
• There are new schemes and rituals including ones that disable crime code and prevent a target from entering the Nightmare.
• You can attack people in public but the defender will have NPCs come to help them in combat rather than the attack being automatically denied.
• Thwarting is now a contested roll rather than a scene. The roll is d100 + 10 × Professional Focus on each side with +5 and ties going to the schemer. This same roll is made with an investigation.
• Mancers without large weapons don’t consume their attack while mancing.
• There’s a new Dissent patrol where Cortex attempts to break up a protest while player societies try to maintain it.
• You can sell other characters to the Syndicate to auction for a cut of the money made.
• Most of the rooms in game have descriptions, now.
• An affects command that displays everything influencing your LF.
• The need to feed was made more oppressive and the symptoms get progressively worse.
• NPC werewolves spawn on the full moon.
• Psychic is an arcane tree. T3s can have legendries. T4s+ have higher discipline caps.
• Hunter poisons are a combat ability that last one round.

There’s quite a lot more than that. A lot of it just isn’t immediately visible.

Since the last merge we’ve also removed all remaining references to Haven. We are trying to make Paroxysm its own game rather than just running a lightly modified version of the original codebase but it is going to take time.

Paroxysm is a modern supernatural dystopian MUD built on the Haven codebase. The supernatural is public knowledge. Humanity responded with fear, surveillance and an increasingly authoritarian world government known as the Cortex.

You can play as a supernatural trying to survive outside the system or as someone working within it. Form societies. Build alliances. Compete over territory. Run schemes. Make enemies. Find meaning in failure.

The server is now online and playable:

Website: https://paroxysmrpg.com/
Host: 51.222.159.210
Port: 3000

This is still a very early alpha. Expect unfinished systems, bugs and the occasional crash while development continues. We’re hoping to move toward a full launch soon.

Development, discussion updates and playtest coordination are happening on Discord: https://discord.gg/Hkx8rcj4k6