@GF said in New Concept:

if you can’t suspend your disbelief for less prejudice but can for God being a space squid who hates you, then maybe sit with that and really think about it.

If it’s a fictional setting? I absolutely can suspend my disbelief for that. But history is established. Someone (sorry can’t find the quote) mentioned “it’s just the 1920s but without discrimination.”

I don’t know what that means.

I’m not being snarky. I hate discrimination with a burning passion in RL, and I fully respect someone not wanting to deal with that in their pretendy funtimes.

The problem is that discrimination is so deeply baked into societal systems that it’s just not as simple to me as snapping your fingers and saying it doesn’t exist.

Everyone always points to Wild West settings and says: “If you can imagine a world where the PCs don’t die of dysentery, why can’t you imagine a world without discrimination?”

Easy. You’re not pretending dysentery doesn’t exist, you’re just saying the PCs are lucky enough to not contract it, or to contract it and survive – both of which actually happened.

“A world without discrimination” is just not the same thing. How did it get that way? Let’s start from that Wild West setting…if racism isn’t a thing, then logically slavery wouldn’t have been. There wouldn’t have been a Civil War (or it would have gone very differently). Heck, the entire economic basis of the south would probably be dramatically different. Oh and would America even exist at all if not for the genocide against the native peoples? How far back do we go with this?

If you want to do alt-history, that’s cool. That’s what Savage Skies did. They picked a divergence point (something about “when dragons appeared” IIRC) and then wrote the history from that point forward to explain why their imaginary world is different from our real world. It’s a bunch more work, but it addresses the issue cleanly.

Less clean is “racism exists but we don’t want stories about it here” because of systemic discrimination. What about the laws of the land? What about PCs who have discrimination in their backstories? It gets thorny.

I’m not telling people how they should RP. I just wish people would stop ascribing evil motivations to those of us who just have a hard time imagining a historical setting as an egalitarian utopia.

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…

That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.

It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.

Ares was designed with privacy and safety in mind. The full privacy policy is at https://aresmush.com/game_privacy.html but I’ll summarize here.

It’s important to draw a distinction between logged and stored data.

Logs are plain-text files, accessible by any admin to track and troubleshoot what happens on the game. Certain commands are not logged for privacy reasons: connect/create (due to passwords), mails, pages/pms, poses, oocs, channel chat, and others.

2023-01-30 17:31:36 INFO - Character Connected: Faraday 127.0.0.1 localhost 
2023-01-30 17:31:37 DEBUG - AresMUSH::Jobs::JobsFilterCmd: ID=1 Enactor=Faraday Cmd=job/filter mine 
2023-01-30 17:31:38 DEBUG - AresMUSH::Who::WhoCmd: ID=1 Enactor=Faraday Cmd=who 

Stored data (in the database) is for the purpose of game features. This enables things like the web portal play screen, channel recall, sharing scenes on the wiki, etc. All built-in commands limit stored data to people who should have access to it. Game admin do not have ready access to everything. Not even headwiz.

• Pages/PMs can only be viewed by the people chatting.
• Private scene poses/ooc chat can only be viewed by the participants.
• Mail messages can only be viewed by the recipients.
• etc.

Pages, scenes, channels and mail all have built-in commands/buttons for a participating player to report offensive behavior with a verified, unalterable record attached.

Now it’s worth noting that even though Ares doesn’t give admins snooping commands–with ANY online service, ANY data transmitted to the server and/or stored in the database is ultimately accessible to the game owner and anyone they choose to share it with. Game owners/coders could install custom loggers or custom commands, or crack open the database manually. Sensitive information is best kept off-game, Ares or otherwise.

@Testament said in New Concept:

Why is the fact that it’s an alternate Earth make it a hangup?

You know how people talk about the “uncanny valley” effect in CGI? There’s an uncomfortable middle ground between real humans and obviously-fake cartoons? In the uncanny valley, things are close but just kind of off in some subconsciously-triggering way. Alt-history settings are like that for me.

Also, one of the reasons I like historical games is because of the setting, good and bad. I grew up inspired by stories about people like Mary Edwards Walker, who became a doctor in an era where not many women could, volunteered (rather forcibly) as a Civil War surgeon, and was awarded the Medal of Honor. Or Kate Marne, who used the fact that nobody would expect a woman to be a detective to nab criminals and spy for the Union. One of my favorite historical-MU storylines was about a woman who grew past her historically-typical bigotry after a trio of LGBTQ chars became like family to her.

Bigotry is bad, but I believe these kinds of stories have value. I want to believe there’s a way to have a space where people can tell those kinds of stories in a historical setting, while also being a safe space where people don’t have to confront that crap if they don’t want to. Some combination of consent and content warnings or something, like what @L-B-Heuschkel described.

Or just go alt-history. That’s fine. It’s not my jam, but I can understand if people just want to avoid the issues altogether.

@lordbelh said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

The 50K and 750K tresholds are also pretty generous as far as I can tell. The part that’s actually bullshit and a real concern is the perpetual licence they’re giving themselves.

But 25% of proceeds is not generous - it’s highway robbery IMHO, even if it does only target the biggest game companies.

The perpetual license is a big deal for business decision-making though, you’re right. The biggest craziness for me was the content rights giving them “nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use that content for any purpose.” You make a cool D20 game? Congrats, they can now make it and sell it out from under you. No sane business would agree to those terms, but businesses that have operated for years under the prior terms now have a gun to their head forcing them to agree or go out of business.

@Jumpscare

@Polk said in Atlantis Users - Don't Upgrade to Ventura 13.0:

Atlantis has been abandonware for most of its life.

I’m not really sure how long you expect software developers to maintain free stuff, but really getting any updates at all after an initial release is a blessing.

The fact that Atlantis has continued to work well for a lot of us for sixteen years, including a major update for 64bit OSes not that long ago, is a commendable feat.

I hope Sparks has the time and inclination to fix it for us, but either way the program’s had a great run.

On topic, no - I don’t know of any decent Mac MU clients besides Atlantis.

@Tat said in Witcher MUSH Design:

You will never, ever build a game without mistakes that you’ll fix ‘next time’. You just do the best you can, every time.

Seriously this. I’ve been running games for ages and I still feel like the line from Jurassic Park 2:

Hammond: “Don’t worry, I’m not making the same mistake twice!”
Ian: “No, you’re making all new ones!”

Thanks all. I am happy to see so many games and players using Ares.

Staffing is a 100% voluntary position, so I have a hard time calling it “punishment”. Punishment is something imposed on you by others.

It can be draining, though. Staffing takes a lot of effort, and the tasks can range from fun to “necessary evil” to downright painful.

It may give you the capacity to do certain things that non-staff can’t do (like be involved in steering metaplot), but if being staff is giving you a ton of IC privileges over the average player, then I think your game has serious issues.

@tsar said in Really random Ares question:

I think a general trend towards overall positivity is beneficial for everyone and I’d rather keep those things than lose them.

Yeah I think it’s all a question of perspective. Like, why do we have upvotes here? What’s the point? Inevitably someone’s going to get bent out of shape that (this) post was upvoted and (that) post wasn’t.

But it goes both ways, too. The same upvote that might cause one person to feel insecure can cause another person to feel validated. Seeing that people who weren’t involved in your scene and aren’t part of your immediate friend circle liked your RP can be gratifying.

Since there are ways to turn it off for yourself (by muting the forum category and even using custom CSS tools to hide the hearts if they also bother you), I don’t see why it has to be turned off for everyone. But YMMV.

@Ren said in Really random Ares question:

if you tell everyone ‘these 10 scenes are particularly worth reading’, more people will notice and read them, and more people are likely to heart them, so the number goes up even further… in other words, simply saying ‘these are popular scenes’ makes them even more popular than scenes that haven’t been actively and officially pointed out as ‘worth reading’.

That’s true, but the trending scene list rolls based on time. So there will always be new ones coming onto the list - it wont be like, these are the top popular scenes and always will be.

@icanbeyourmuse said in Really random Ares question:

Until yesterday I thought it was based on how many attended. I’d prefer that if one feels they need the ‘top scenes’ or similar such things.

I understand the perspective and appreciate the thoughtful responses (this one and the others).

How many people attended a scene doesn’t really say anything about a scene IMHO. If anything, my experience suggests a negative correlation between scene size and whether the scene log is worth reading.

Trending scenes is inherently a popularity contest, though, since it’s based on hearts. So I can understand and sympathize with brain weasels triggering feelings of inadequacy. I just think that can happen a lot in MUs, from who gets RP to IC social advancement and advancement. I don’t think that’s inherently a reason to remove such “systems” for everyone.

Players who don’t wish to see the trending scene posts can mute the forum category. And individual games may, of course, turn them off entirely via the game config.

As someone mentioned, the post is easily disabled, but I’m a bit curious why folks are so bothered by it? It’s just meant to be like: ‘Here are some good scenes you may want to check out.’ It’s not a contest with winners or losers.

@Third-Eye said in Neo Draconis: Embrace the Weird - Discussion:

I will say I get the temptation because I have, with my own eyeballs, seen people I know are repeat offenders obfuscate themselves by not using handles. It’s a thing people do.

Known repeat offenders also obfuscate themselves by just creating a new handle, though. Even IP blocking isn’t particularly effective in the modern era of ten-cent VPNs.

But props to Raeras for being open-minded about it.

@STD said in Neo Draconis: Embrace the Weird - Discussion:

So making it a requirement to play on your game is directly in conflict with the stated goal of the handle in the first place.

Philosophically I agree, though of course I have no sway over policies on individual games.

If the goal is to track alts, the Players page will reflect alts using tags as well as actual player handles, as explained in the help files:

There are two ways to get your characters to show up on the Players page:

• Link a character to your AresMUSH player handle.
• If you do not have a handle, add a profile tag to your character’s web portal profile in the form player:<playername>. Player name can be either your main character’s name or some other moniker used to tie your characters together.

Other than that, I can’t think of any reason why you’d want to require handles. Unlike requiring, say, a validated email address, handles don’t really offer any tangible benefit to staff or do anything to verify your identity. (Someone could just create a game-specific handle to meet the policy, so it accomplishes nothing.)

Handles are just a social tool for presenting yourself to the community independent of your character. They serve no administrative purpose.

@Pavel said in MU* Wishlists:

I would argue that the human element is the entire point of a MU*. The fact that you are interacting and collaborating with another human being through the thin veneer of a fictional character is one of the key differentiators between MUing and other forms of gaming.

This.

@shit-piss-love said in MU* Wishlists:

My wish is actually a game that supports PvP very well and not liking someone IC and OOC is considered fine.

I don’t think there’s a game in existence where all the players liked each other OOC. I know I routinely get caught between two friends (or groups of friends) who really can’t stand RPing with each other. And that’s fine - different tastes, different personalities.

But let’s not conflate liking someone with the ability to problem-solve and handle conflicts in a mature manner. They are very different things, and one neither requires nor implies the other. PVE games have stupid schoolyard drama, but PVP games tend to ratchet it up to 11. I just can’t stand dealing with it (as player or as staff).

@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:

FS3 has luck pools right? I feel like something like that could be used for things like Willpower. But I haven’t looked at how it’s handled.

FS3 doesn’t have scene-based or time-based luck pools. It’s just a permanent thing you spend, like XP. So it meshes a bit better with asynchronous/simultaneous scenes. Once you spend it, it’s gone, and it doesn’t really matter what order you do it in.

@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:

What I’m saying is that OOC secrecy and code like obfuscation etc has not been something I’ve experienced in Chronicles of Darkness games for several years now.

Cool. I’m not really involved in that community so all I know is second-hand. Like in your own post you mentioned shapeshift code, a pool tracker, and desc changer - all of which would be tricky to do. Not necessarily impossible, but certainly not straightforward. Those are the sorts of obstacles I am referring to.

If you don’t need any of that and just want a cooperative, OOC-transparent, non-immersive CoFD game with some stats and die rolls, you can absolutely do that in Ares. Indeed, people have.

@Livia said in MU* Wishlists:

I know it’s been said before that WoD/CofD and Ares probably don’t fit, but when I think about the recent CofD games I’ve played, there really haven’t been a lot of coded systems.

The reason they don’t fit is not really about the sheet/roller, it’s about a) the atmosphere of OOC secrecy and b) all the ancillary system code like blood tracking, obfuscation, etc. that tend to be more common in those games.

For more info, see the discussion: What would it take to implement CofD in Ares

There have been several WoD games that used the RPG plugin to basically work like an online tabletop with text/PDF sheets and a simple roller. Everything else is left up to the GM. It worked fine. Just comes down to the type of game you want to run.