@Ashkuri

I have a question. What do you get out of MUSHing, a hobby wherein you write paragraphs at people in a turn-based format, when you’re not actually doing the writing? What’s the end goal there?

Unrelated to Grounded 2 (though I’m very excited about that!) is The Demons Told Me to Make This Game. It’s early access and only the first chapter is available, but it’s a Disco-like wherein you’re a demon(?) who possesses a couple different people to advance a storyline. Here are some screeners!

And (spoiler for plot stuff)

Spoiler

It’s so funny and very well written.

@Hobbie said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

the reality of housing shortages

I’ll have to make a note to include that when I launch my Vampire the Masquerade: Sydney by Night game.

Oi just be daring and set it in somewhere like Campbelltown. People can still afford to buy there.

Not that they want to.

Not that they should.

Would love to sit here and have a whinge about this very topic but that’s a whole other… topic lol.

Well, it’s not California or Texas so that in itself would be a draw.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@somasatori said in MU Peeves Thread:

The worst options are deeply reactionary (buying mundane equipment with XP to keep your thumb on the players)

Referencing any games in particular there, Soma? >_>

No, no, not at all

@Pavel said in AI PBs:

Alas, most research I’ve seen thus far has been on clinical applications of LLMs rather than their clinical impact.

“I don’t need a therapist anymore, I talk to ChatGPT and it helps” - BPD patient I was working with

@Gashlycrumb said in MU Peeves Thread:

when people left their houses and businesses stayed in place to be sold/rented out again. Buildings didn’t just disappear, but there weren’t that many empty ones either and I sort of hoped that the PCs might fight over some of the best houses in the city.

From a game design perspective, this works better if there’s a concrete economy rather than the usual abstract ones that are representative in most MUSHes. Not sure what type of game you were running, but something with discrete numbers to represent your characters’ cold, hard cash makes this more worthwhile. Systems like WoD, GURPS, and others that have a merit/perk/boon referring to wealth flatten the experience since there’s a lot of room between (in WoD) Resources 2 to Resources 3. That could be a small luxury apartment or a nice rental house in a not-so-rich part of town.

Same with resource trading. Most smuggler or equipment-provision characters in abstract wealth games don’t have any real mechanical function, as you can usually just buy stuff up with your Resources background/merit/whatever in your own stockpile so long as it doesn’t require additional skills or black market connections or something.

I’m going to mark my own MU peeve and say that resources and equipment house rules always fucking suck. The worst options are deeply reactionary (buying mundane equipment with XP to keep your thumb on the players), but even the best ones become super weird. If you have 2 dots of resources worth of stuff to buy every week or month, I always feel like I’m wasting it if I’m not getting new stuff.

@MisterBoring said in MU Peeves Thread:

but have those set up so that they are turned invisible and locked if the character that ‘owns’ it goes idle.

This is a good solution to the dead grid issue that a lot of older games face. Something I tried to do, which I didn’t do well because I’m not much of a coder, is set up the housing system in DI to be linked to your approval. If you were set to unapproved either through staff freezing your bit or the idle freeze, you’d trigger a script that checked builds linked to your bit and then cleared them. I couldn’t get this to work for builds that weren’t created by the rental system since that operates differently.

Grids should be set dressing for the game and do exactly what @MisterBoring mentions. If you have a larger space dedicated to wilderness areas, then you’re telegraphing that you want to tell stories based around the wilderness.

I don’t really like the Ares model myself. I’m fond of abstract representations of grids because a lot of the grid space ends up as dead filler space. There are a few ways this manifests, but the current crop of WoD games are good examples of how this ends up working. Liberation has a lot of street/intersection rooms that see no use except to serve as a place for players to plop down builds. Those builds become hangouts, and no one will generally walk to the hangout they want to go to, they’ll use the +hangouts command (or analogous command). Dark Water kinda did this, in that it was largely just big sections of Port Angeles set up and connected up to one another.

This leads to a lot of questions: like why even bother having the highways around Los Angeles built out on the game since a) no one’s going to start scenes on those – what would that scene even be like if it’s a social scene? You’re not going to RP being in a car if random people show up; b) the storyline of the game kind of prevents players from running scenes on those (they’re controlled by the Technocracy in Liberation canon); and c) most players don’t have the authority to run scenes on the game, let alone using staff resources.

For DI and RM which arguably use the same grid method of nodal points based around neighborhoods, there ends up being a good deal of useless space that’s there to just for the sake of completionism. How many Houston wards get gameplay? Of those, what’s really crucial to the game?

It’s really frustrating to see grids get out of control rather than having like @Jenn is saying with regards to how rooms might be set up. I personally wouldn’t go so far as to desc out a parking lot for the grocery store, but jut have “Grocery Store” and either implement places (join the parking lot place) or have a scene set indicate that the scene is currently taking place in the parking lot.

@thrax said in Numetal/Retromux:

To the playerbase of Newbetal/Retromux

An Apology to the fullest.
It is true The player behind Kahula overstepped a non contact request.

This is really all you have to say. It doesn’t really matter what you do or say to someone, if you’re explicitly hiding your identity to trick someone into interacting with you, it is (imo) bannable. There are some people out there who have completely destroyed their reputation in the hobby and often that infamy is not the kind of thing that people would just straight up forgive. I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with a handful of names of people that would immediately ruin the experience of a game if they were found to be there.

I have no idea who Kahula is or was so I’m not going to speculate on whatever their reputation might be, but befriending someone on a separate platform without mentioning that you know each other – especially when they’ve invited you to a game which usually prompts a “oh, what MUSHes have you been on? Have we played together?” conversation – is such a red flag that it’s a specter haunting Europe.

After reading through this I see why you titled it as if you were submitting it to a conference @Pavel.

I have a ton of thoughts which I will work on writing out, but this is a very good discussion that needs to be evaluated further. Honestly, an social psych analysis of MUSH trends wouldn’t be a terrible idea for a legit academic paper.

Hey Eddie, I was Charlie. Nice to see you again!

I quit! I am going to continue working on the WoD20th code on my own, and I might run a Mage ttrpg using it, but no more staff at DI.

My main focus will be finishing up my Cyberpunk Red game.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

Another thing I’ve noticed is that some members of staff immediately jump on the defensive when someone makes an often justifiable complaint.

Yeah, can’t say I’m a fan of that. Especially when it’s defensiveness about code. I often joke that I’m a clinical psychologist who is hobby coding python here, but that’s exactly the case. I know I’m not going to be as good as bitMuse, Theno, Kumakun, Volund, etc. I definitely don’t need any white knighting on behalf.

“Well we’re in beta these things happen” is fine and good, but there’re repeated instances of players being unable to actually see each other, much less actually RP together.

This is such a weird bug. There’s this one and that ooc room one where going if from the ooc room will occasionally keep your account linked to the ooc room while your puppet (in traditional MU terms, your bit) goes on to wherever it is you’re headed.

I’m definitely still working on both of these, but they’re real weird because there’s no discernible pattern as to when they happen. My weekends suck due to childcare stuff, but when I was looking at it on Friday I found a quirk in the character typeclass that stored a previous location attribute (used for commands like +return) using the same name as the location attribute (I just used “self.db.location”). The kicker is I can change this and it’ll just be a bunch of waiting until whatever random assortment of commands occurs that causes the bug to appear.

As for the other one, they have to be linked! Maybe! It’s also possible it’s a reality level thing. In hindsight I should have just created typeclasses for umbra rooms so stepping would just teleport you to another room with a different room type, but instead I made it place a tag on your character that changes what you can and can’t see. Then doubled down and did the same thing with fae stuff. I need to code review that one. I really want to get it to a state where there’s nothing super game-breaking so that it can be released. Then more people can make MUSHes to keep the hobby buoyed a bit.

So when a new person complains about that, and mentions their irritation at the round-a-bout way of fixing it, just say it’s being worked on and then shut up. You’re staff, if you’re whining on the Newbie channel, you’re doing it wrong.

It’s not only the newbie channel though, there’s a lot of immediate defensiveness in the Discord that just doesn’t need to happen, aside from that whole meme about what belongs on what channel. I feel like I say “not everything deserves more than an acknowledgement” more often than I should be, because there are full fledged arguments that occur and it drives me nuts.

It’s fine to just be like “thanks!” or “thanks.” It’s also fine to just say, “Ah, good suggestion! Sounds like it would be interesting.” even if you never plan to consider it. Also, like… In the instance that someone does aggravate you to the point that you get actually angry it’s far easier and less personally disruptive to just step away and ignore them than to keep the cycle going.

Not much to be done about it, though. At this point it feels like staff culture. Maybe a bit too defeatist, but – well.

@Roz said in MUX/MUSH Code Repositories:

Not a repository, but a tool! This got posted to Reddit just today: Visual Studio tools for PennMUSH

There’s also this one by Kumakun for rhost!
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=digibeario.mushcode

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori Good. Now go back to finding vamp staff so I can actually do things.

I wish we could get those original vamp staffers back. I also have a vampire character, but I don’t really end up playing on DI very much on account of the coding.

Where’s that-- oh yeah

We opened with too much shit going on at once, is what it is. And then we had people jumping into these sort of half-baked spheres that didn’t have all their plot or lore written out, which is very stressful. I’m glad that Scylla’s cool with us doing a temporary shutter of the vamp sphere until we can get things tighter and more consistent.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

Storytelling coordinator, to me, means that I manage the theme elements of the game.

Then I’d probably recommend “theme coordinator” then, rather than a title that evokes the storyteller-as-decision-maker role.

Good idea!

@somasatori said in Re: Dies Irae:

I did want to note, btw: I’m not headstaff there, really.

…who is? That could be a substantial part of the problem.

We kinda don’t have them? I mean, there are some folks whose words are probably more listened-to than others, like Scylla, me occasionally, and Charybdis, but we’re ostensibly supposed to be doing things democratically.

Edit to add more context: For instance, when we banned Polk, we deliberated about it. I think this probably is not the best way to go about it, especially if there’s someone who’s doing something imminently bannable. Polk didn’t actually do much on DI which would have been considered harmful to anyone, which is why there was a lot of deliberation on the topic (and for transparency’s sake, I abstained – not because I have a particular love for Polk, but because I haven’t had much interaction with the guy outside of “wow, he sure loves crashing games”). He was banned for being Polk, which didn’t sit well with some folks, and that’s okay. I mean, the democratic process is such that it allows for that kind of thing. People are allowed to disagree and voted as such. The vote to ban him won out in the end.

Super worried when we do have an immediately harmful or threatening player, though. Deliberating over the course of a week and a half when Johnny PKGriefing-SexAssaulter is going around committing his namesake is not grounds for a good MUSHing experience.

@Pavel said in Re: Dies Irae:

Yeah, I must have missed reading that previously, @somasatori. Your title of “Storytelling Coordinator” sure as hell sounds like a headstaffy one.

It does, I agree. So the project was originally started by Scylla back in June, around the time NuMetal got crashed (I guess the first time now? The Polk time). I was asked if I could come on to do the Mage stuff and write metaplot details for the game as a whole. After a time, there was a clear indication that we needed some additional guidance in the back end, or someone to be an arbiter, and a vote was called. Charybdis and myself were elected. This was before Kuma had his life explode and couldn’t do code anymore, which is when I inherited that role too. Then I somehow got looped into being a co-lead for Werewolf and Fera.

though I’m fine with my side of the Fera. I handle Mokole, Rokea, Ratkin, and Ananasi and I like my weird little gross/slimy/fish-scented dudes. Nagah’s in there too, but it requires a group app (3), and we all know how easy it is to get a group of people to get rolling on a game.

Anyway, I didn’t really want to be headstaff, especially not in the administrative sense. Storytelling coordinator, to me, means that I manage the theme elements of the game. To paraphrase Hephaestus’ description of how he’s seen it on other games: the role is to ensure consistency and fairness across different groups, that players have adequate hooks into plots and that there are enough staff to run them (HA!).

I’ve done the administrative headstaff thing on three places now (Metro2 [Saturnine], The Reach [Roanoke], Fallcoast [Toska]), and I 100% get burnt out so fast by having to make all of these quibbling little rule calls. It’s why I was cool with Storytelling Coordinator, as it feels more vibes based: coordinating plot, making sure there’s a cohesive story, making sure equal attention is had by all, all that jazz. Sometimes I wonder if I even like WoD all that much anymore. I certainly don’t play it as a TTRPG; I tend to do more PbtA or other hippie-dippy story games. Sometimes I will break out things like Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun.

That said, I have also been playing WoD games (and all of them, really: Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Changeling, Wraith, Hunter, Demon, KotE, blah, blah, blah, and then all the CofD variants) for something like 29 years now, and remember the rules better than I remember most of my undergraduate classes. So, it’s a path-of-least-resistance thing.

Prior to this, I was writing a Cyberpunk Red game using Evennia as my base. It’s even almost done. Edit to add: That doesn’t mean I’m leaving! Just that it’s been nearly finished for a while now and I might one day go back and finish it up and release the code with an install.sh installer file for folks to run Cyberpunk games.

That’s a lot of words to say: <begrudgingly> “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” If I were the actual headstaffer, as in quasi-benevolent dictator, I’d probably do that San Diego Zoo of Darkness thing I mentioned (stealing @labsunlimited’s term there).

@Pavel said in The 3-Month Players:

@Faraday said in The 3-Month Players:

TV shows and novels don’t tend to have much (if any) BarRP

… what about Cheers?

How can I play my mysterious, be-trenched, katana-wielding cyber drifter if everyone knows my fucking name??