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What stops you from running a game?
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@BloodAngel I’m not versed on Thenomain’s codebase, but I think the first thing I’d ask any aspiring game creator is, “What part of your game do you want to make that can’t already be made with AresMUSH?”
And then I’d suggest taking that list of features and trying to make them fit into the AresMUSH guidelines. And lastly, I’d suggest asking the AresMUSH community for how to do the things that remain on your list.
In my opinion, Evennia and AresMUSH can do almost the exact same things, except you get more customization out of Evennia and more ease-of-use out of AresMUSH. If you have a setting and just want to run scenes on the web with other players, AresMUSH is ideal. If you want any of a traditional grid, in-game secrets, NPC AI, or automated combat, Evennia is probably the better choice. There are plenty of other choices out there, but those two appear to be emerging as the two modern choices with the greatest support.
Anyway, best of luck to your endeavors!
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
@Testament said in What stops you from running a game?:
Savage Skies on how they handled their magic system
I agree here. Savage Skies had a good magic system within the constraints of AresMUSH.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
For me it boils down to three things:
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Poor time management skills. I probably have the time to run one, but I am so bad at managing my own time that I don’t feel like starting a game would be a good idea.
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Lack of code knowledge. I have plenty of coding know how, but don’t know MU code at all.
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Financial stuffs. I realize the server requirement for a MU is pretty inexpensive, but my finances are as turbulent as an airplane attempting to fly through the wall of a hurricane, so there’d be multiple times where the game would vanish just because I suddenly needed that money elsewhere.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@Jumpscare Thank you. I will look into that!
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@Testament said in What stops you from running a game?:
The unwieldy part, and I realize it’s unwieldy, is that some spells could only be used ‘outside of combat’ because there was no way that they could be implemented into FS3. At least, not that I know of. A limitation of FS3 is you can’t buff your teammates en masse, but you can debuff opposing NPCs.
It can be done using either @Tat’s magic system or custom combat hooks. We had a lot of (busted ass) custom commands on GH, including buffs and debuffs.
I am a lousy coder and was able to figure it out enough that it worked. A good coder could probably drop in custom hooks with relative ease.
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@KarmaBum I really really love @Tat’s magic system.
However, I really really do not understand Tat’s magic system and I’m fairly sure my game would implode on me if I tried to implement it without someone holding my hand to do so.
I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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@Testament said in What stops you from running a game?:
@KarmaBum I really really love @Tat’s magic system.
However, I really really do not understand Tat’s magic system and I’m fairly sure my game would implode on me if I tried to implement it without someone holding my hand to do so.
For the record, my magic system is heavily intertwined with FS3’s vanilla code and I don’t really recommend that anyone try to use it on a different game without being a real comfy coder themselves.
Many of my commands also have a tendency, to quote KB eloquently, to go ‘broke ass’ in unexpected ways.
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Imposter syndrome is my answer to the topic question. I don’t have confidence in myself as a gamerunner or a coder. I have quite the idea for a homebrew fantasy setting based on personal writings, but Ares doesn’t have the functionality I think I need (e.g., custom magic and magical research systems). I lean strongly towards Evennia based on some of the work Tehom has done for Arx, but my inexperience with django kicks in and that veers me away from commiting, because I feel so daunted by the amount of research and learning-by-error ahead of me.
I also would hate confronting problem players or being the parental unit of a game. So there’s that too.
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@L-B-Heuschkel said in What stops you from running a game?:
… otherwise, a player will rack up several hundred magic thingies.
One of the more recent editions of Shadowrun… 5e or 6e, solved part of this! At least… in theory, if not direct mechanical practice here. You have items degrade in power over a short to medium time. Like, hours to days at most.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
I have reams of ideas; over the years I’ve put together about a dozen design docs with themes, mechanics, plots, etc. But I’m both very code dumb with a low threshold of frustration where it’s concerned…
And I’m also a giant flake. I just am. I have a hundred ideas every minute, and focusing on any of them usually requires someone else to be enthusiastic about one of them. That doesn’t generally happen, and I get distracted. Even if I put a game together, my expectations tend a bit more towards tabletop etiquette not ‘customer service’ and I suspect I would become seen as a tyrant very quickly. And then I’d get frustrated and leave.
It’s better to just shut that whole inevitable cycle down before I disappoint people.
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@Jennkryst said in What stops you from running a game?:
@L-B-Heuschkel said in What stops you from running a game?:
… otherwise, a player will rack up several hundred magic thingies.
One of the more recent editions of Shadowrun… 5e or 6e, solved part of this! At least… in theory, if not direct mechanical practice here. You have items degrade in power over a short to medium time. Like, hours to days at most.
That’s another way to go about it, yes. One which also requires you to code decay – and more importantly, to consider how you want that decay to impact different parts of the playerbase. People who play daily may spend their stuff daily and not be impacted as heavily as the async players who may take a week to spend loot.
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I am admittedly intrigued by the number of “code limitation” answers.
And then curious on the flipside: How many people who won’t open a game because of code limitations would still play on one where implementation was janky?
GH had a terrible implementation of FS3 that was totally unbalanced and all the custom code broke all the time, and people played there till the place was basically falling apart. As @Tat mentioned, her awesome magic code was often busted, and people still played SL till the day the doors closed.
Is roll play the limiting factor to role play?
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@KarmaBum
I do wonder why the option of doing something more freeform where things are just GM/player negotiated, or settled with a very basic dice roller, doesn’t come up more often, especially compared to plug-in code that doesn’t always fit what the game-runner wants to do. -
@KarmaBum So I’m missing a phone code, and places, The sheet could work, but trying to get in some of the newer merits. It is more I could open now. But it would be very buggy and limited, with the powers and such. I also don’t think all of the Hunter sheet items are updated to 2nd. But, I don’t know how to even pull up the code to double-check it.
So that is my personal issues.
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@KarmaBum I would absolutely play on a place where implementation was janky. I do like to roll dice, I ADMIT IT, so I wouldn’t be as interested in a place that was all negotiation and no ‘let’s see if this works’. But a very basic dice roller and character sheet code would work for me.
However. As a game RUNNER, that would frustrate me, because I would feel like I wasn’t doing enough to make it a good, easy place to play. That’s my damage, though. I don’t judge other people by the same standards.
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@KarmaBum I don’t think so. Because all I have my players do is just a bunch of skill checks, and then I roll checks against them. In my mind, I treat it like DnD as best as I can.
It’s not elegant, it’s not pretty, but it does work. It is however, hard to track at times. I think it is more about role play than roll play. But there is something to said about wanting things to be easier despite that. So I’m all for more automation in these kind of things.
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@Pyrephox Same!
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It’s my impression that people are happy to play even very janky setups as long as they feel that an attempt at game balance has been made.
On Keys our magic system is skill based. The more experience you pour into the relevant skills, the more spells you get. People feel balanced with that because it’s their own choice whether to aim to become powerful sorcerers or be good at more physical things instead.
It’s certainly very simplistic. It’s meant to be – we wanted to be able to fire up the game pretty much right away rather than wait on ourselves managing to code something more complex.
… Not that that stops me from still pondering how to expand it, but that much is obvious.
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I think there’s Role Play which takes place a lot by players, but there’s also the Game element which is the more system in place element.
The beauty of his hobby is that a lot of times both exist together. Players role play through a lot of the game, but then there’s the events or actions that trigger game events. Those of us that are looking at the code barrier to entry are talking about the fact that we want the game element to be as functional for the players (and ourselves) to help with that part of things.
Otherwise, why not just set up a big google doc?
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@Pyrephox said in What stops you from running a game?:
I don’t judge other people by the same standards.
That’s what I think a lot of the hang-up for people is. But then I figure… Bot’s use of FS3 on HM2 was enh and all manual and strange, but we still had a good time. GH was never well-balanced, but we had some good times.
IDK. I want more games to play. Get over yourselves and make games.
