@Juniper Unless it’s a creative writing assignment.

I’ll be honest. If my sheet is hidden from others, I’m probably not going to use the numbers on it. Not because I am intentionally trying to cheat, but because I’m lazy and don’t want to put in the effort to look up the actual number. I’ll just use a number that’s roughly in the same ballpark, unless I know someone can call out my lazy ass. (Psssst, don’t tell my players I do this at the table as a GM. Though, they probably have guessed that considering that I seem to remember all those numbers so well without consulting my notes.)

@MisterBoring said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

At this point, it should be pretty simple for the staff of a game to create a Google Drive folder or something equivalent to hold the PDFs in a fashion that each character’s sheet can only be accessed by the player of the character and the staff of the game.

Everyone has to be able to see the stats if you’re just doing pdfs; otherwise, how do they know you’re rolling right? “Yes, I totally have five dots in every attribute and skill. You can’t see the pdf, but it’s totally there.”

@Raistlin said in Coded Systems vs PDF Sheets:

So I’m curious: would PDF sheets be a dealbreaker for you, or would it not really matter as long as the game itself was solid?

Nope. A lot of the games I played had that as the method, especially the Kushiel games. The only downside is that everyone can see your stats, so, if you’re trying to keep that hidden, coded stats it has to be.

@InkGolem The one located at the memory addresses starting at 0x7FFE4A71.

I think it would be help to clarify the distinction between the two. How many rules are needed before a “freeform” game is now a “system” game? It might be something like the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity “I know it when I see it,” but it might be helpful to roughly delineate the boundaries, because I consider rules-lite RPGs to still be a system. If a book is being used to run a game, even if it’s only 10 pages, that’s a system to me. Whereas, kids playing cops and robbers in the backyard is freeform.

@Jumpscare The short-desc stuff is what I was meaning. I forgot to elaborate my thought in the previous post, but that’s exactly how it worked in a few of the RPIs I played.

I am pro-system for almost anything not at my dining room table. If I can’t pelt you with dice, meeples, pencils, or wads of paper for being a nuisance or coming up with inane drivel, I want some rules in place to govern our characters’ interactions.

@Faraday It’s codebases, but those codebases supported different styles, so they became shorthand for a particular style.

To add to that, I think MUCK is derived from MOO which I think is MUX-ish, maybe a touch lighter in crunch/code, but I think the style for MUCK is “must have furries.”

@bear_necessities said in When is the last time you played?:

This is the one part i struggle with, mostly because i’m not sure how to make the lore 100% accessible without people feeling … I don’t know, like they know the whole story so why would they need to play I guess?

To find out how the story resolves? Just because everyone knows all the details of a setting doesn’t mean they know how it plays out. If an adult with any awareness of the social conscious were to start watching Star Wars for the first time, just because they know Vader is Anakin and Luke’s dad doesn’t mean they know how it all plays out. If you play D&D, try some more OSR style campaigns where the GM just sets up the game world with a calendar of things that happen if the players don’t do anything that could affect it and turns the players loose.

I missed the survey. I was on vacation, then real life got hectic, so I wasn’t checking on here. It’s interesting data, though.

As for the differences between MU*s and RPIs, most people answered the question. I like to think of RPIs as just more code heavy MUXs. My dream server would be a combination RPI-MUSH. I love the fact that when your character enters a room, you don’t get the actual name of the other characters. I’m not sure how you square the circle of characters with vague identities and players with set identities, but I’d love to see it.

@Jennkryst The only decent idea George has ever had with Star Wars is retaining the merchandising rights.

@Ashkuri Curiosity. A tie to one of the few internet communities that I have been a part of for a long time. The delusion that one day I will open a server and need to keep up with things happening in the space.

2+ years ago. Nothing has really sounded that interesting or it uses systems In bit keen on (async), and I don’t have much time for it anymore.

@Faraday

Life got busy, so here is a very belated reply.

Anyways, it may be something different. It was sort of like the SCP stuff that’s popular today. The most prominent one that I remember was a wiki, and you could go to a page and edit it, retconning things, continuing the scene by writing new material, whatever. There were some rules of engagement about how much you could edit in a day, what sorts of things you could do, etc. I think some of it ended up on An Archive of Our Own at one point.

@Pacha said in Grid vs Web Scenes:

I think another thing to consider is that in the “old” days a lot of the live RP was like…pickup RP. You went somewhere on grid, stuck up your LFG flag and whoever turned up turned up and you sort of just made do with that. This led to a lot of the dreaded Bar RP.

The deliciousness of Ares is (for me) that I don’t have to put up with that any more. I can go and read everyone’s hooks, pick out who interests me (and almost as importantly, who I have no interest in) and then just seek to RP with those 5-10 people.

That lends itself to more 1 on 1 private scenes that can very naturally go async as the parties go about their lives, and I find those scenes tend to be more directed and purposeful. I am going to stick with that scene until its finished, rather than just “posing out” of the bar scene when my interest/patience wanes.

I have two problems with that. The first is that it doesn’t allow for relationships and situations to develop organically. Those set up scenes never seem to be “our characters come across one another and strike up a conversation before becoming fast friends a few scenes later.” They always seem to start in media res. And when they do start as “our characters come across each other,” things feel stilted. You’re in a scene with this other person and you have a very specific direction this scene is supposed to go in, “developing some sort of relationship so future scenes can be had with them.” There is no chance that if things seem to be going sideways in the characters’ interactions that you can pose out or ideally shift more of the interactions to other person’s present.

The second problem I have is that it doesn’t leave room for happenstance. You’re not going to have the scene interrupted by someone barging in unannounced and taking the scene into an unexpected direction. This can be a good thing as maybe those already in the scene aren’t up for a detour and shenanigans, but some of my favorite scenes came about because of such incursions.

Also, I am a weirdo who likes BarP.

If I am MUing, as in everyone is controlling one character in a scene, it needs to be live. I cannot do async in such a framework. I lose emotional connection to the scene and interest. After the second day, I lose complete interest and have already moved on.

If I am doing novella stuff, which I call collaborative writing and I haven’t done in decades because I’m picky and it has an even smaller population than MUs do, it HAS to be async. Someone (I’m not scrolling up to see who) was poo-poo-ing on this style, suggesting that such a framework focuses on the writing aspect at the expense of collaboration. That is incorrect. I would actually argue that MU*ing is much less collaborative as everyone in a scene tends to be looking out for number one with number one being their character. It’s a different mindset.

You don’t consider one character in the scene just yours. All of the characters are yours and all the other participants’ to work with to craft a good story. What you control is a portion of the scene not a character. It’s like improv with a lot of “Yes, and…” The other writers become partners and you have to work with what they give you and they in turn have to work with what you give them to craft an interesting fiction.

The focus is on having a good scene that, if an uninvolved person read, they would go “Damn, that’s a good bit of writing and a good story.” If this were in person, it would be less D&D and more story-game, like Microscope, City of Winter, and Fall of Magic, with something like a talking stick that gets passed around the table with the person having the stick getting to come with whatever they want but the other players have some form of veto power. Also there tends to be way more OOC discussion, figuring out where everyone wants the scene to go, what they want accomplished with which characters etc. Also also, it leads to people being more willing to have bad things happen to the characters, since there is less personal investment in a particular character. A character is just one of many that you use to write a story. I have argued that MU*s should adopt this style more but everyone tends to react to it like I’m suggesting we sacrifice infants to the Elder Gods, so whatever.

I have closed down four games and dwindled but never left until it closed on one game. Either I stick it out, even if just occasionally popping on until the end, or I leave within 3 months of joining.

I am still of the opinion that players identify too closely with their characters in MU*s for most people to be divorced from feeling bad when bad things happen to them. I think exploring other story game designs, such as Everyone is John Dread, Microscope, Band of Blades, The Quiet Year, The Fall of Magic, Swords Without Master etc.

@Clarion said in AI In Poses:

They just absolutely are not trustable, and I think human intuition of “wait, this writing feels wordy and bland and disconnected from what’s actually happening in the scene” is both more accurate and more useful right now, because if a person isn’t using AI but does sound wordy and bland and disconnected from the scene, that’s still worth checking in about.

Wordy, bland, and disconnected? Shit. Now I’m starting to think that they trained the AI on my poses.