Minigames in MUSHes
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Double post!
So in PyReach, which is what I’m calling my Evennia nWoD project, there’s something that I’ve been working on for a little bit which I’m just generally referring to as the mystery system. Here’s the basics of how it works:
Staff and players who are running plots can create mysteries, which are basically just investigative plots, PRP or otherwise, that players can do. They’re designed to be attached to existing plots that are being run, but don’t necessarily have to be. Someone can do a self-contained investigation without it being a whole thing.
The plot runner creates the mystery and then can go around to different grid rooms or locations on the MUSH and create clues. Clues can be built into objects, exits, rooms, and even characters (though PCs receive a note that requires their consent. The different types of clues are attached to different methods of searching for said clue.
You have investigative clues (things you can easily see and need to be searched or directly investigated), perceptive clues (things that you might notice about the environment at a glance or a feeling), research (like your traditional library/internet sort of searching), and interviews (talking to an NPC). The plot-runner will specify the type of clue and then, if they want, they can specify a set of dice they need to roll to do it, as well as a general difficulty (between 1 and 5). Further, players can specify prereqs to view a clue. So you might need to be a vampire, a mage, a mummy, a demon, or you might need a specific level of a skill or a merit, like Unseen Sense or Occult 3.
For example, let’s say I set up an investigative clue called ‘ritual circle’ in a room. My plot is a difficulty 1 plot, not designed to be super difficult and good for newcomers, pretty low stakes. I’ll leave it as having the default difficulty. I’m also not going to specify any prereqs on it as it’s a big bloody ritual circle in a room and this is also designed for mortals. Since this is a search clue (which I realize doesn’t show up on the screenshot, but something to add I suppose), I default to rolling Wits + Investigation. If I succeed, I’m rewarded with the descriptive text of the clue and we roll the progress percentage forward.
The idea behind this is to do a couple things:
1) it should hopefully make it a little easier to create more engaging plots that can be accessed by people outside of scenes.
2) it makes better use of the grid, since things will be hidden on the grid itself and require digging around on it. Additionally, I’m working out the kinks on it but I’ve set up a “leads” element that the clue will tell you where you should go to find the next one.
2a) Ideally people would RP around searching for clues and shit, but either way it would allow for some engagement in the plot from people who can’t make a 3pm Eastern Standard Time scene.
3) I often play investigative characters and it usually kind of sucks unless you have people who are making plots specifically for those kind of characters. In my experience, a lot of plots tend to be combat focused or socially-focused.There’s a decent amount of work ahead for this, but it’s a good work-in-progress so far. I’m on the fence about having a participants list for individual mysteries, since on one hand it would be cool to stumble into a clue and be drawn into a mystery that way, but on the other it would also kinda suck to have someone snipe clues who isn’t really part of the plot. It currently notifies the mystery maker as to who has discovered the clue, and then will allow for multiple discoveries of the same clue, so maybe I’m making more work for myself here.
To be continued!
"And the Fool says, pointing to the invertebrate fauna feeding in the graves: 'Here a monarchy reigns, mightier than you: His Majesty the Worm.'"
Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destines -
@Muscle-Car Hehe! I think I loved that skull and the raven more than anybody else did. I don’t think people chatted in the OOC room enough to find out all the shit the raven reacted to.
I was working on another one, but I am shite at coding so that sort of thing always took me forever. It was a sort of, uh, senseless endless RIsk game where it emoted that the player turned a crank on the side of a map table, making music-box music and causing the paper pop-up of a random city come up. Then you needed somebody else to have a go. If it rolled you a city that was already popped up it’d cause the city to produce an army of <number between whatevers> <temperament related adjective> <profession> (200 jolly butchers, 475 savage street urchins) that you could direct. So the desc of the object would be some ever-changing silly stuff about it being a table with a map of Westeros on it and The North is controlled by the Crownlands using an army of 765 serene whores and so on.
I didn’t expect people to care about those toys, it was just for me to puzzle out how to make them and snigger to myself about them.
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@somasatori so you could also set up clues using a skill like Academics or Occult? Could be neat for a cop sphere to have clues tied into Medicine for autopsy stuff too I guess. Sounds neat!
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@Rucket said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@somasatori so you could also set up clues using a skill like Academics or Occult? Could be neat for a cop sphere to have clues tied into Medicine for autopsy stuff too I guess. Sounds neat!
Yep, that’s right. It’s all modular and tag-based, so you could do an x-files thing and have a prerequisite for “group:law,occult:1” (any member of law enforcement with at least one dot of occult). It just operates based on checking the character for the appropriate attribute and then verifying the value, which is either an integer or nominal. You could get really really specific with it and do “group:law,template:changeling,occult:3,wyrd:2,mantle:1,court:summer” This would be a changeling cop with 3 dots of occult and at least Wyrd 2 and a dot of mantle as a member of the Summer Court.
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@somasatori Holy crap I love that.
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@somasatori said in Minigames in MUSHes:
- 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.
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@Faraday said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@somasatori said in Minigames in MUSHes:
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.Yeah, this is my fear as well ._. That’s why I was thinking that I might make it participant based, where someone signs up to join the mystery, similar to like an events system. That won’t prevent people from joining mysteries and clue farming to troll, but I figure whoever uses the system can ban that person after that point I guess.
I was also thinking about setting it so that a mystery participant makes progress in the mystery - as in they advance the progress tracker- and people who aren’t signed up to the mystery will get some kind of option to be initiated. It would also allow for people not connected to the mystery to discover a clue that might have already been investigated and be “initiated” into the mystery apparatus.
“I discovered the ritual circle in the warehouse on 12th Street that points to the cultists of the crimson warden.”
“We knew this already, but you show good initiative!”
etc.I’m not making a MUSH, I’m kind of doing a mu-in-a-box thing for nwod since I very much missed the genre over the usual 20th anniversary/old world of darkness current trend (though I’ll probably set up a prototype sandbox once (read: if it ever) is done).
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@somasatori There’s an easy solution, though. Just code a way for observant staffers to slap clue-farmers upside the head through the internet.
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@Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again.
"She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something."
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park -
@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@Tez said in Minigames in MUSHes:
Video games give you sight, sound, real designed elements that work together to create a satisfying feedback loops that makes the grind provide the dopamine.
They even occasionally hire psychologists to work out the best ways to do this so they can take a lot of your money.
I am not sure the sight and sound stuff are the relevant bits. It’s just ordinary operant conditioning, and a simple trick to ‘teach’ at that, you don’t have to back-chain or anything. Still probably the kid who teaches the puppy training class at PetCo is better at it than most shrinks.
It’s very relevant to MU-running, what with how frequently good-player behavior is unrewarded and troublesome behavior gets reinforced.
Here, this will help: https://search.worldcat.org/title/Don't-shoot-the-dog-:-the-art-of-teaching-and-training/oclc/1085215000
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So there’s a bit of game theory involved in the mystery thing, I think. Just using the prereq system, you could either set it to be very open, like no prereqs (or very minimal), let everyone on the grid join in, OR you could be like “I’m only allowing Changeling cops who are summer courtiers with Occult 3 and Mantle 1” and maybe get the two or three people that have access to that. If the character doesn’t meet the prereqs for the clue, they will never see it.
Going super restrictive kinda defeats the purpose IMO, but here’s my stupid idealism getting in my way, I guess. The PyReach project uses the same grid layout system that the Reach did, hence the name. So as a for instance you might have an area code of DT for “Downtown,” then each room in that district will have an incremental room number. So DT01, DT02, DT03, etc. My vision of this was that someone could post on the BBS to the effect of: “I have hidden a clue in the rooms between DT01-DT05, I’ll take on the first five people who find this clue into the following mystery, which is linked to my plot, blah blah blah.”
I’ve been having this thought of how we might make MUSHing through storylines easier for people who are working and have very busy lives and the thought of West Marches-style play came up (and coincidentally I had a conversation immediately after that about the same topic). So, you could have these kind of forum-ish style of play with people dropping into and out of plots based on their interaction with different clues and secrets throughout the plotline, with various GMs running different elements.
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@somasatori I’m guessing this is basically a lockstring variant you’re using for filtering out the accessibility of these hints/mysteries/clues?
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@dvoraen said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@somasatori I’m guessing this is basically a lockstring variant you’re using for filtering out the accessibility of these hints/mysteries/clues?
Yeah, that’s basically it! It’s a lockstring that uses the ‘stats’ attribute on the character, then does a string match for value names (which are absolute, like skill, merit, words like ‘template’ and so on) and then attempts to apply either another string match (for templates, merits, lodges, blah blah), or establishes the least value like if you listed mantle:1 as a lock, but the person has mantle:2 (or whatever).
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@somasatori Pardon my code ignorance, but it feels like you could use a variation of this to have plot attributes - i.e. someone signs up for Plot 13: The Square Bullet Hole Murders, gets an attribute like square_bullet, and could be eligible to find any of the clues for that plot…but it also might open up things like a plot command that auto-mails everyone who has signed up for that plot, or that lets GMs easily pull up how many people are involved in a given plot (or even plots as a whole, and how many people are involved in, like, 4 plots, if they want to do some quick analysis of how interest/involvement is distributed across the playerbase).
I’m not saying you want to, or that’s even the point, but it’s something that intrigues me, as a way to have a decent understanding of activity levels beyond log-in numbers, and maybe recognize if there are people who might appreciate being drawn in.
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@Pyrephox that’s not a bad idea! I think doing something like that but on the opposite direction. The clue is linked to a database entry for the mystery which has a list of all the mystery attributes like difficulty, number of clues, any descriptive text, etc. it wouldn’t be hard (I say, currently at the clinic and nowhere near my personal computer to actually investigate this) to add in storage for the character object ID.
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I am all for mini games. It’s part of why I lean more towards RPI than MUSHes.
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@Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again.
Just let me have my slap-upside-head tool okay.
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@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes:
@Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again.
Just let me have my slap-upside-head tool okay.
Fiiiiiine, but only because I’m a sucker for a sad face.
