Posts made by Istus

Game’s good, would recommend.

I’ve already thrown enough of my soul at it that I am already burning out!

@OnceWas It was present at 10:00am EST today. As I said, someone has since gone in and wiped the entire board as there was more than just this advertisement in there.

@OnceWas Someone has since cleared the entire board.

WARNING: Cursing, questionable text-based content, etc.

Spoiler

@Polk More likely in play to inflate online player numbers.

@Cobalt I’ve never played a game as a member of a family. How do you reconcile things like time zones/play times?

@Mercutio Including these points in the application would be helpful. I would also include examples so that I can get excited and engaged with the ideas and thus more motivated to slog through this.

Picking the Memory item at random here: What might happen if I lose a memory? Am I aware that I have lost a memory? Is the memory lost random? Provide a made up scenario like: Sarah likes puppies because she had one as a kid. After dying, she lost that memory and instead of being happy and excited when it comes to interacting with cute animals, they just make her sad now and she can not explain exactly why.

@Mercutio I do not have particularly constructive suggestions to offer as I was cycling through games at the time in an effort to find a new home so I do not recall many details. The only reason I piped up is I wanted to mention that even though I did not go all the way, my experience was a positive one. With that preface out of the way…

I am pretty new to these games and my attention span maybe isn’t the same as most of the community. I think at a high level, my problems mostly hinged on my disillusionment with writing backgrounds and filling in these massive personality quizzes that never come up beyond getting in the door past whatever gate staff has erected.

I do not have a specific desire to spend hours detailing my childhood, creating a dozen memories of varying gravity, and digging through a Codex just to get a feel for things in a game that I may or may not enjoy. I also did not know anyone on the game. The desire to invest so much time piecing together things just was not there.

I have never had my background have any meaningful impact on a game unless I instigated it and at that point whether or not the hook I drop is in some staff set field on my bit is immaterial. The purpose of these fields, aside from the ones that are obviously there to define what my faction is or whatever mechanics underpin the rollplay part of the game, is not apparent to me. I get that the application process is a filter of sorts but a broad strokes overview is likely just as effective at gauging my ability to roleplay in a sane way as a granular recounting of every major event of my character’s formative years.

I would like to see, in all games, the barrier to getting started drop as low as possible. This could result in limited power, or a restricted involvement in things until more concrete decisions are made, but it at least would encourage me to see the value in completing a big application in the future once I am more invested.

TLDR: I’m lazy and either need an extrinsic reward to invest the time or understand the value of each field in an application when it comes to my future roleplay.

Feel free to prod me on any point of this rant. It’s probably not particularly articulate and it is not specific to just Elder Tale.

I personally found the application process and the depth of information to absorb too onerous to give the game a fair shake. This being said, those I interacted with on the help channel were earnest and motivated. The real problem was me in the end.

Happy to see an original content game still thriving!

@CuriousGamer The TestDummy has been a thing for a long time.

@Whisky It’s on top of Evennia.

@Whisky I probably should not have attached a label to it. I don’t think I truly understand the nuance between the various flavours. I’ll do my best to describe the end goal.

It is not a MUD. It may feel like that since my focus on chatter here has been on mechanical elements. That is only because that is where my current interest lies.

What I am shooting for is a storytelling platform with TTRPG elements. I do not expect, nor wish to encourage, a roll with every pose. When you roll against someone the result is not automatically applied. There is no enforced social or combat cadence such as turn order. There aren’t NPCs running around to whack at.

I personally like ‘stuff’ and I like acquiring abilities or whatever. I also like writing flowery nonsense as if I was authoring a novel. I am attempting to combine these in a reasonably cohesive way with a slant towards favoring narrative over rote execution of a system.

Theme-wise, I want to focus on city life and its outskirts with pressures coming from an on-going war, organized banditry, a powerful religious faction, and the aristocracy. Of course there is room for ‘monster of the week’ type stuff as well.

A little fluff piece I’ve been fussing with:

Novigrad, a city of wealth, power, and decadence, is a place of contrasts and conflict. With its towering spires, grand structures, and bustling streets, it is a hub of commerce and politics, where powerful factions vie for control. The church, with its imposing cathedral and army of fanatical faithful, holds a great deal of power, seeking to impose its will on the masses through holy doctrine and the threat of excommunication. Meanwhile, the criminal underworld, embodied by the powerful King of Beggars and his network of thieves and assassins, operates in the shadows, manipulating the city’s commerce and politics to suit their own ends. The rich merchants and powerful nobility hold court in the city’s many taverns and palaces, vying for influence and wealth, while outside the walls, the common folk struggle to survive. The air is thick with the scent of intrigue and the sound of clashing steel, as the different factions jostle for position and advantage. Amidst all of this, witchers, sorcerers, and other outcasts roam the city’s streets, surviving by their wits and the edge of their blades, always searching for the next job that will keep them fed and clothed. Such is the city of Novigrad, where the strong rule, the weak suffer, and only the cunning survive.

It’s a little puffed up but I’ll pare it down eventually.

@shit-piss-love This was good to look at.

Further refining my ideas on character advancement, I have the following items in mind:

• I am building my system with the idea that it will take a year for the first character to hit maximum power. I suspect that very few people will actually get to this point.
• Mechanical power gain will be non-linear with most of your advancement happening in the beginning of your character’s career and tapering off as things get to the end. For example, the last six months may actually only represent a power delta of 25% versus someone making the exact same specialization choices.
• New players will only require half the time to get to the point of the player with the highest level of experience.
• The ‘advantage’ that comes with being around longer than someone else is reputation you earn through social interactions and the opportunity to acquire ‘stuff’.
• XP earned beyond the cap will be converted to a currency for fun things like custom item descs, recolors, or whatever cosmetic nonsense. It’s a little mobile game-y but no mechanical advantage will be had.

@Jennkryst You’re better off looking at Ainneve. It’s actually intended as an example: https://github.com/evennia/ainneve/blob/master/README.md

I have everything I need to get to a functioning alpha now. Everything else will just have to come out in the wash.

The goal has always been to create somewhere I want to play, to avoid the problems I have experienced elsewhere, and to be in a position to create new features and fix problems as they arise. Hopefully someone else will decide that they want to put some effort in to participating as well.

If it does not work out at the very least I can take the experience and the framework, refine it, and give it another crack in the future.

Not all of the feedback was truly constructive, for sure, but even purely dissenting opinions have value. I have not digested everything as of yet but here’s some cliff notes of my headspace for those that are curious:

• I am slowly pulling back from my ‘log everything’ perspective. I think that I may end up having a report function that allows a player to highlight something problematic in a verified manner.
• I like having some extrinsic rewards. This obviously does not jive with the purity of RP for RP’s sake but whatever. I will figure something out.
• I really like the idea of consistent XP for existing rather than tying it to a specific activity. I really want to reward people for participating in a meaningful way but I do not want to expect people to be on daily. I think in the short term this means that if you don’t have /some sort of scene/ in a two week span or such you will start to get less of a return until it approaches zero. There may be a vacation mode ‘cuz life happens.’
• There will not be any nom/vote systems or any system defined notion of prestige. If you want to be well-known, get out there and be that thing.
• There won’t be classes. On a surface level I think I will set things up such that there is baseline availability of skills or whatever and then later on you can buy in to a specialization or two - or never specialize at all if you wish!
• There will be an upper cap on the amount of mechanical power you can obtain and you can not get everything. This will likely be tied back in to the specialization notion I am mulling over.
• There won’t be randomized vendors for ‘stuff’. How stuff distribution works is still a jumble in my mind but I may roughly tie it to an activity metric or something (re: extrinsic rewards for participation). Hand-me-downs will be prevented in some manner - advanced stuff requiring advanced skills or something. Who knows?

I may not always sound like it, and we may not agree, but I appreciate the suggestions and criticisms. Spending your own time to help me refine things is lovely.

@IoleRae Right.

@IoleRae Totally anecdotal, and I certainly have not looked for it. I have only dipped my toes in to three games so my sample size is very tiny!

@Pax I am not surprised. Definitely a short-sighted thought on my part.

@hellfrog I hope I never have reason to look at them if they end up existing.

I have never seen a game be up front about what they do or do not log.

@shit-piss-love said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

@Istus said in On the utility of Logs, Receipts, and Proof:

Is the idea worse than doing nothing? What I am trying to wrap my head around is whether such a thing is intrinsically negative in terms of the behavior it would encourage me to engage in. If I understand its limitations, and do not rely on it to ‘do my job’ what negative consequences could arise from it?

Do you consider reading the logs of people who have not asked you to read them a problematic act?

If permission to do so was not granted at the outset, absolutely. There is a reason I have been very clear that anything I end up doing will be clearly labelled on the tin - be it logging everything, logging nothing, or something in between.

For all discussion/debate purposes I hope that everyone is considering things from the position that nothing is being done without previous disclosure and acceptance prior to making a character. There may be some subtlety in specific cases such as noting that some words may automatically trigger an investigation but not publishing the specific words.

@mietze I think I should clarify that ‘doing nothing’ in this case is specific to triggering passive investigations based on keywords or not. It does not mean that everything is hands off outside of that one discussion item. Part of the reason why I am so passionate in finding some balance of tooling and culture management is because I have been the victim of this sort of behavior in the past, like many others, and anything I can do to prevent it or slice it off early I will try and do.

@Pavel You’re probably right. These debates are constructive and help to check my personal biases.

There are opinions and perspectives here that I may not have considered. The result will be better for it.