julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 7, 2018 23:22:09 GMT -5
Because you can play Arm whenever you want. If you could find enough people, I think you could have a DND style game running 24/7 in an online tool. The big blocker is exactly what I think it is in Arm; there is a multiplier in prep time to run a good plot driven environment with a narrative that specifically includes the pcs in it. I was storyteller, admin, and then head admin on a mud that did as many as seven gm-run rpts a week in its heydey. It suffered from almost exactly the same ratio... that a decent atoryteller needed to spend 3-5x as much time preparing as running events. It still worked for years, but suffered from the same staff tendency to sit around upstairs and socialize that Arm seems to have. I still lay this problem at the feet of Arm staff. I'm just suggesting that a group of six to ten storytellers with a small technical support team would be required to run the dnd game/mud/rp driven checkers game you are talking about. I think the problem is selecting, replacing, and keeping a team like that motivated. Seems like death is an inevitability unless the attrition problem is dealt with. For an RPI I expect: 1. Permadeath (good) 2. No holds bars, no safe zones (too many soldiers in cities) 3. No restrictions on RP (murder is okay but rape is not? elves cant be called neckers yet slavery, human trafficking, and raping vnpc females to make muls is okay?) 4. Equal footing (no staff favoritism) no karma until you grasp game mechanics. Allow game masters to punish those abusing code by making an example of them in RP with murder, torture, etc... much more fun and educational w/o people getting personally offended. 5. Game masters who play with you and enjoy the game by playing NPCs and bringing the world to life. (not disciplinarians to fucking punish people.) 6. Transparency (no fucking secrets to give an advantage to veteran players. syntax alone is a bitch.) If these 6 categories were corrected, staff douchebaggery would end, the game would function more organically, there would be less attrition, and it woooould set an example for other muds in different settings. Really the only sustainable niche for muds are RPI so why not do it right?
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delerak
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"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on May 8, 2018 8:50:00 GMT -5
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faroukel
Displaced Tuluki
What's a story without a villain?
Posts: 201
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Post by faroukel on May 8, 2018 8:50:08 GMT -5
Eh, just cause it's been mentioned here. There is an RPI engine in devel with the stated goal of offering the ability for tabletop/rp groups to nominate a storyteller/DM for their group within the framework of the mud. Written in Ruby.
check it out if interested. always looking for people to log in and try and break stuff.
ardamarred.com/#/home
Can make an acct through the website, check out the portal tools and build rooms/items/crafts/mobs...one of the big features we wanted to bring in was to give players the ability to create their own content. Can create a test character there, do your thing, or whatever...but this is sorta Delerak's thread, so I'll probably post more somewhere else eventually.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on May 8, 2018 8:50:55 GMT -5
So funny.. it has 33 comments and pretty much no upvotes or anything. Funny how you can spark a huge debate or discussion and yet trolls downvote. That's okay though not here for the post karma.
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on May 8, 2018 8:52:23 GMT -5
For an RPI I expect: 1. Permadeath (good) 2. No holds bars, no safe zones (too many soldiers in cities) 3. No restrictions on RP (murder is okay but rape is not? elves cant be called neckers yet slavery, human trafficking, and raping vnpc females to make muls is okay?) 4. Equal footing (no staff favoritism) no karma until you grasp game mechanics. Allow game masters to punish those abusing code by making an example of them in RP with murder, torture, etc... much more fun and educational w/o people getting personally offended. 5. Game masters who play with you and enjoy the game by playing NPCs and bringing the world to life. (not disciplinarians to fucking punish people.) 6. Transparency (no fucking secrets to give an advantage to veteran players. syntax alone is a bitch.) If these 6 categories were corrected, staff douchebaggery would end, the game would function more organically, there would be less attrition, and it woooould set an example for other muds in different settings. Really the only sustainable niche for muds are RPI so why not do it right? My list on TMS was quite extensive. www.topmudsites.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4804
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delerak
GDB Superstar
PK'ed by jcarter
"When you want to fool the world, tell the truth." - Otto Von Bismarck
Posts: 1,656
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Post by delerak on May 8, 2018 8:53:55 GMT -5
Be forewarned that TMS thread is ludicrous. It devolved into a big fight between muds that wanted to call themselves RPI but clearly were not. Worth a perusal though.
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faroukel
Displaced Tuluki
What's a story without a villain?
Posts: 201
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Post by faroukel on May 8, 2018 8:55:09 GMT -5
gotta admit, I love reading muddites gettin' all riled up.
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mehtastic
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Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,335
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Post by mehtastic on May 8, 2018 9:36:05 GMT -5
wew lad
I know what you're trying to get at and I generally agree, but let's not pretend that 99.9% of rape-related RP in Arm wasn't just big-titted f-mes played by 350-pound men claiming that some random shady dude had raped them just to get the entirety of [insert city here]'s population to turn against them.
Again, the problem with Arm lies just as much if not more at the feet of the community as it does at the authoritarian chokehold staff keep on the game.
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mehtastic
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Armers Anonymous sponsor
Posts: 1,335
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Post by mehtastic on May 8, 2018 9:52:13 GMT -5
So funny.. it has 33 comments and pretty much no upvotes or anything. Funny how you can spark a huge debate or discussion and yet trolls downvote. That's okay though not here for the post karma. Most of reddit: "Downvote for low-quality posts, not because you disagree" r/MUD: "Downvote if this post makes you scream with rage at the mere thought of constructive discussion" Armageddon Discord: "Downvote anything or anyone critical of Armageddon" So this is how a niche community dies... with thunderous applause.
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OT
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 257
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Post by OT on May 8, 2018 12:58:07 GMT -5
If you could find enough people, I think you could have a DND style game running 24/7 in an online tool. That's basically what a MUD is. That's how they started: a substitute for tabletop RP, playable anywhere at any time. While you could attempt to run a graphical platform, I don't think that's very conducive to serious RP. This has existed in various forms in the past, and maybe still does somewhere. Private Neverwinter Nights servers pretty much did what you describe. The RP was always really dodgy, though. Graphics are just antithesis to top-shelf RP, both because it attracts some players who aren't looking specifically for that and because any graphical engine will have limitations that get in the way of RP. Finding enough people that you personally know to fill a persistently running game is a bit of a tall order, so there'll have to be strangers; and once strangers have to RP together in good faith, it requires a game crafted for that sole purpose. Otherwise it just doesn't hold together. That's why I think only text-based media is going to yield a serious roleplaying experience. Say what you will about the RP standard of Armageddon, but it's still miles ahead of what you can expect to find in your average tabletop D&D group. It's on a completely different level. I was storyteller, admin, and then head admin on a mud that did as many as seven gm-run rpts a week in its heydey. It suffered from almost exactly the same ratio... that a decent atoryteller needed to spend 3-5x as much time preparing as running events. It still worked for years, but suffered from the same staff tendency to sit around upstairs and socialize that Arm seems to have. I still lay this problem at the feet of Arm staff. I'm just suggesting that a group of six to ten storytellers with a small technical support team would be required to run the dnd game/mud/rp driven checkers game you are talking about. I think the problem is selecting, replacing, and keeping a team like that motivated. I don't really see how this hypothetical 24/7 online D&D game is different from any given RPI. Most of the RPIs have only a few staff members, it's just that Armageddon has this strange, unique staff culture where like a whole tenth of the community is staff and all their time is tied up in bureaucracy. And you know, that wouldn't even have to be a big issue except for the fact that they also demand a say in everything that happens. That's where the problem comes in: they don't keep the game active and alive on a consistent basis, but they will still put a stop to just about any player endeavor that veers a little outside the narrow confines of pre-approved play. An example that comes to mind is when some character wanted to learn to read and write. They went through a lot of trouble, made it into an actual plot, and then staff told them that they'd be force-stored if they were to continue. If staff wants that kind of iron grip on the game, the burden is on them to actually be there on a daily basis, running stories and world events that give people something to log in for. Although they have the numbers to make this possible, Arm's staff doesn't do it--and moreover, they become hysterically defensive if you dare to point out this problem. That's when the "WE'RE VOLUNTEERS GODDAMNIT" card gets played. You can't reason with them. They've created a problem and now they're defending it to the hilt. Armageddon has all the makings of the perfect roleplaying experience. Dated code aside, it has the potential to be a 10/10 game. What holds it back is the staff and, by proxy, the habits of a playerbase that has lived with that staff for the last decade. It's sad to see a game with so much potential fall so short of it, but the damage seems to be done and I don't think they can start to repair it without some kind of reboot; and we know how that went last time. All they'd really need to do is just stop getting in players' way. Stop meddling all the time, stop gating everything behind arduous and time-consuming requests. Even if they don't have the time or desire to actually run HRPTs and meaningful plots for players, it might still be an 8/10 game if they just took their foot off the neck of the playerbase. Big, time-consuming staff events are only needed because staff won't let players do big things themselves. So could you make a persistent D&D server that people can log into and play autonomously? Maybe. But I don't think it would be very different from today's Armageddon. It would probably resemble it quite a lot, in fact. You wouldn't be able to do anything that affects the world itself unless a GM was there to handle it in real-time, and you just can't get that ratio of staff/player time. Instead, the healthiest roleplaying environment is one where players have freedom to do things on their own within reason, and you can only really have that on a MUD where the all-text medium makes it practical. There's a lot Armageddon could do to expand its scope. Last year I played HavenRPG for a couple of months, and while I don't think it's a particularly great game, it opened my eyes to certain things. On Haven, players have a hell of a lot of freedom to do things. You can buy a property and just design your own house or shop. There's no approval process for characters. You can design your own items. You can create your own clan. You can set a plotline into motion with features that make it an in-game reality backed up by the code. All of this with little to no staff oversight, even though the game is for most intents and purposes an RPI. While many of those features wouldn't fit into Armageddon - I'm certainly not advocating for the ability to create your own items on the fly, or for the removal of character applications - it made me realize that Arm's brutally rigorous restrictions aren't necessary at all. Take something as simple as the ability to append some text to a room description to reflect something you did; unthinkable in Arm's culture, but I never saw it misused on Haven. And on Arm, starting a clan or opening a shop is so difficult and so laden with incredible requirments that I think it has happened like twice in ten years. Why? I don't want to play Haven. It's a weird game with a lot of wannabe-horror features I hated. However, trying it out made me realize that you can give players a good deal of creative freedom without ruining anything. The ability to rent a plot and create a house on it was an idea I'd once have rolled my eyes at, because what's stopping someone from making a house that looks like a giant dick with swastika-shaped windows? But people didn't do that. Although I don't necessarily want that exact feature on Arm, it taught me that you can trust players a lot more than Arm's staff does. Player agency isn't inherently dangerous.
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julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 9, 2018 22:29:00 GMT -5
I think I'll do Roll20 with some friends.
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Post by sirra on May 10, 2018 0:00:40 GMT -5
Roll20 is great. I ran a tabletop game for my old friends that I no longer lived near, for a couple years straight.
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julio
Displaced Tuluki
Posts: 270
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Post by julio on May 10, 2018 20:48:31 GMT -5
OT great post about trusting players. It's really easy to undo a swastika windowed house and permakill the player's character. No fucking need for karma.
Someone plays a bad HG, kill the HG. Fucking solved.
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Post by lyse on May 13, 2018 11:00:38 GMT -5
Delerak, I would like to point out that many folks who play muds, do so from a DND background. For me, I would like to play with my friends once a week, except our lives are so far apart. If we could just coordinate, log on a mud, one of us be game master to drive plots, that would be awesome. But in Arm, the perfect coded platform, we'd have. #1: Not allowed to coordinate. #2: No plots to follow (other than, let's go hunt a gith) #3: There are no game masters, only disciplinarians. And they RARELY play with you except on a blue moon. Imagine if their job is to make the world alive and engage with you how much better a game would be? This should be what karma is for #4: Character advancement takes to much work for a bunch of friends to meet once a week and play for a few hours. In DND you can expect to advance one level per campaign. Because of this, the DND demographic gets turned off. Who's left? Mud sexors. Code twinks. Teenagers who have time to play after school. Losers who don't have spouses, kids, or a job, and are therefore angry dicks on Reddit. Edited to add: and therefore those losers have time to play. The thing with a MUD is always going to be it's a persistent world in a way that a table top game never could be. So even in a campaign, everybody picks up at a point where you left off. In a MUD the campaign is always going on whether you're logged on or not. That is always going to present the problem of the guy or girl that will sit there for 12+ hours playing. For years, I've been saying you can't just blame the staff for Arm's problems, what you said right there is exactly what I meant. Arm just has a player culture that is very....questionable. I don't think staff even knows where to begin to change that. #1: This is a rule, yet it's one everybody doesn't follow. If you go in thinking this is a game where nobody coordinates, you're in for a rude awakening at some point. It's noticeable on different levels, ever been about to go on an RPT and someone you haven't seen in a loong time mysteriously shows up or comes in at the very last minute? Ever seen two characters that don't know each other, suddenly have a very strong affinity for each other? None of that is by coincidence and it has a varying degree of harmfulness to the game. Everybody knows what's going on, yet everybody pretends like it's not going on. #2: This has always been a thing I've been on the fence about. I've seen players ignore plot hooks or kill the plot hook before the plot even went anywhere on more than one occasion. There's been times I've been sitting at my pc like "Dude...you just killed a plot hook." Sometimes, I think gith plots are the only thing players respond to. I've always felt like there should also be multiple plot hooks that don't hinge on that one thing happening so that if the unthinkable happens, there is another door open somewhere else. #3: This is something I've been advocating for a long time. It's the best thing about MUSHES to be honest. If you have the rule book and a monster manual you can run your own one off or mini-arc. I'm with you 100% that would be a great use for karma and player agency. You have no way of knowing how your staff feels about you or running things for you. There are times when you're stuck with a storyteller that just doesn't like you or will do anything for you. This idea eliminates that to a limited degree. 1 karma allows you to spawn a couple of low level threats and you can have a fun little outing to break up the doldrums. I can't see people abusing a feature like that. 2 karma allows you to spawn a couple more low level threats or a couple mid level threats. That's what most people that play are happy with anyway. #4: Character advancement always comes down to who plays the most or as we put it "THE ARMS RACE". This is always going to be a problem in a persistent world. There's always going to be that player that is willing to log in at 3am or when their timer resets and box the tembo or treats the game like their own personal Dragonball Z training montage. I really don't think staff can do much about these kinds of players. I wouldn't call them losers, but their sole goal in the game is to "win" and they'll go to extreme lengths to do so. I don't think it's the DnD demographic that gets turned off from the game. I think it's the type of player that is actually trying to collaborate with other players that gets turned off from the game. We're talking about a game where the coolest story people have is how their twinked up assassin one shotted an aide that had zero combat skills because they wouldn't MUDsex them. There's something wrong with that picture.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 13, 2018 23:02:08 GMT -5
Character advancement always comes down to who plays the most or as we put it "THE ARMS RACE". This is always going to be a problem in a persistent world. There's always going to be that player that is willing to log in at 3am or when their timer resets and box the tembo or treats the game like their own personal Dragonball Z training montage. I really don't think staff can do much about these kinds of players. I wouldn't call them losers, but their sole goal in the game is to "win" and they'll go to extreme lengths to do so. I don't think it's the DnD demographic that gets turned off from the game. Also Julio saying: "6. Transparency (no fucking secrets to give an advantage to veteran players. syntax alone is a bitch.)" Setting aside the tired drumbeat of Bartle playtypes, we know muds are going to get: Powerplayers who want to see bigger numbers Players who want to figure out secrets for a variety of purposes People who just want to socialize and/or mudsex People who want to drink (or bathe) in the sweet tears of their victims One of the more interesting things about Arm's failure to me is that I've seen many examples of powerplayers ruining muds or other online games. I've seen a couple examples of griefers ruining games (your opinion of Eve Online might vary). Arm is the first example I've seen of socializers ruining a game. More importantly, this community to me carries the further lesson that players (by which I mean addicts) demand inclusion. I dont think that trying to write a mud to only serve one playtype is ever going to work. The powerplayers want someone to show off to, and if they cant compete, they leave. If there are no secrets to find, because they are all on wowhead, or only an elite have the secrets, another subset will complain or walk. My own feelings about griefing being a form of sociopathic behavior aside, I will begrudgingly admit that the griefers probably have to be included and implicitly supported with content and mechanics. Otherwise they will make their own fun, and I dont much like that outcome. I think Arm fails for precisely three reasons. Social players like Lizzie couldnt compete in other games. I say this because I played with some of these people before in another mud. Now that they have a comfortable nest, they wont let their perceived natural opposition gain any ground. Changing design elements in a game Is Hard(tm). This is the same blocker that keeps me and a few others from standing up a mud over a weekend or even a month thats worth playing. In any group with a membership of more than a decade, everyone is an expert who feels like they alone know the right way for the group to work. I hold out dim hope that one of these conversations will arrive at a new mud being built, but mostly I dont think any of us actually change our minds when presented with new evidence here. We want what we want, consensus be damned.
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