@Juniper Idk, but it’s nice of them to let you know you shouldn’t play with them again!
Posts made by Clarion
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@Roz …oh. Well that’s much less harmless.
I thought it was just somebody having solo pretendy funtimes playing their Character A meeting and hanging out with their Character B. Not something I’d do on a game, but sure, whatever.
Pretending they weren’t playing two characters and hiding IP addresses and mixing up poses and funneling stuff back and forth is… not good. I will take the radical stance that it is, in fact, bad.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
That sounds a little weird but totally harmless to me, honestly! Unless they’re getting some kind of unfair advantage from it, or avoiding opportunities for not-just-with-themselves RP or otherwise refusing to engage with the game, I hope they have fun with it.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
Wait, so we’re not talking about vignettes or solo RP or whatever here (which most of the world would just call writing, tbh), but someone playing two characters in a scene together?
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RE: Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG
I just want to give a HUGE shout-out to @Jumpscare – both things I brought up in my feedback last week have already been addressed!
No more smacking into walls when I try a command that doesn’t exist, no more awkward freeze when I see a new person and aren’t sure if they’re an NPC or not! That kind of responsiveness from a game runner just feels like MAGIC.
Thank you @Jumpscare!
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RE: Silent Heaven: Small-town Horror RPG
Very cool vibe and chargen!
Two pieces of feedback as a new player:
- Issue: Being unable to tell NPCs from PCs is really frustrating as a brand-new player and made me nearly bounce off the game.
Without friends nudging me to stay I would probably have just given up the fourth or fifth time I had a moment of social paralysis because “here’s yet another character standing alone in a room or street, and if they’re played by a human I want to pose and interact properly, but if they’re an NPC I’m going to need to use very clear
to
commands to trigger dialogue from them, but my character would never just wander up to an actual person and demand their name and job title, but if they’re an NPC there’s no ramping up with smalltalk and I just need to run through the dialogue tree for this NPC to get an idea of their role in the game, but if I guess wrong and use my NPC-greeting routine at a human I’m going to be mortified, and oh my god whatever, I only have an hour of free time tonight, I’m going back to the hotel and logging off and doing something else.”I know that NPCs being puppeted by storytellers will have a clear flag for that, but for every other NPC in the game there’s absolutely nothing distinguishing them from PCs except that they’ll usually auto-talk at you once you introduce yourself. That doesn’t solve the problem of knowing how to interact with them on first contact, and as someone who already gets pretty overwhelmed when trying a new game and getting into the RP flow of a new character, that was driving me absolutely nuts.
Suggestion: Some kind of indicator for which characters are NPCs would be a huge help. Given that there’s already an automatic flag when NPCs are being puppeted by staff, there clearly isn’t a immersion thing going on where we’re trying to pretend NPCs should be indistinguishable from PCs, they’re just indistinguishable when in actual NPC mode. Making NPCs more easily identifiable will also encourage new players to be more proactive exploring their scripted dialogue, and there’s a lot of fantastic dialogue.
- Issue: The game taking the first character of any unknown command and trying to use it as a direction (what’s
where
? surely you must meanwest
) leads to me constantly smacking into walls or walking where I don’t intend to when I forget commands.
Having the game automatically try to parse unknown commands as directions also makes experimenting with commands feel a lot riskier. I saw this was also a major part of @DrQuinn new-character-immediately-gets-organs-harvested-when-offline ordeal, because they typed a command starting with
d
that the game didn’t recognize and interpreted asdown
, taking the character out of the safety of the hotel room.Suggestion: Limit the number of unknown commands the game will try to parse as directions. Logic like
if command in ['s', 'so', 'sou', 'sout', 'south'], go south
(handwavey placeholder code, I don’t know the codebase) would still allow for half-typed directional commands but not try to fling characters southward whenever the player forgets thatscan
or whatever isn’t a command used in the game. This would make experimenting with commands less risky and prevent inadvertent IC movement due to OOC mistakes.I’m looking forward to exploring the systems and getting into the lore of town!
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RE: Ares: Client or Portal?
Entirely portal, even when doing F3 combat. The portal is kind of terrible for that but TECHNICALLY POSSIBLE and so I stubbornly persist.
(A lot of work has clearly been done to make F3 combat stuff work on portal, which I’m very appreciative of! It’s just, uh, clunky.)
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RE: Equalizing Character Progression
I’m absolutely terrible at min-maxing and being strategic about XP/leveling, so FS3 has been almost ideal for me on the two games I’ve played with it.
On Savage Skies I did screw up a little by having a character start super underpowered, with almost no truly high stats. IIRC an admin even double-checked if that was really what I wanted to do, and I said my dude was inexperienced IC and I looked forward to leveling him up over time. That was true, but I didn’t realize just how long the cooldowns on XP spends were, and just how long it would take to raise a stat from middling to high. I spent a lot of XP on that game and maybe barely brought him up to where he could have been straight out of chargen.
(Could I have reached out to an admin for help? Sure, if I were a different person that did things like asking people for help instead of stubbornly living with the consequences of my own dumb decisions.)
I chargenned day one on the Network, so in theory I would be in dinosaur territory there, but I love that the caps on stats and skills mean that my dude really isn’t crazily more powerful than anyone else. He just has a zillion points thrown over time into background skills, so he has a bunch of niche talents that make perfect sense as having been acquired over time in-game.
On every oldschool stat-heavy MUD game I’ve ever played, I ended up with completely hopeless builds and spent my XP all wrong and was always nerfed for everything compared to anyone who actually understood how to take advantage of the systems. That was less fun.