04 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
In a book, the author can describe a man in a bar as "a large man in a green shirt with a sour demeanor, arguing with the bartender over the proper way to mix an Apple Pie." 100 pages later, the author can then refer to the same person, e.g. "Newly introduced, Ben looked at George. He looked familiar, though Ben could not recall why. Then it struck him. George was the surly man at the bar last week telling the bartender how to mix Apple Pies."

Even with an automated tracking system that remembered everyone each player has seen, where they were seen, and what interesting activities they were engaged in when seen, the MUD is totally incapable of figuring out _who actually matters_. When I log into a game and there are 100 players online, chances are I don't and won't give two shits about 90 of them. They might be the center of their own universes, but to me, they're noise and background fluff. If your game is attempting to pretend that it knows that most other people are background fluff while automatically figuring out which ones aren't, it will fail. The failure will be painfully obvious. It's like how a game with no soundtrack can be bland, but a game with an annoying or jarring soundtrack can actually be unplayable (without turning off the speakers, at least). Regular MUDs ignore the issue of separating important players from unimportant ones and just let the player himself figure out how to deal with the information in a natural, if unrealistic, fashion.


I don't see why this would be the case. Note-worthy people should be notable to the player, the mud only needs to provide a vehicle for retrieving information that eases the player's tracking of that data. If a player doesn't bother to "remember" or "name" a player who robbed him 3 days ago, why should anyone care if he forgets all but the basic description?

elanthis said:
The only real use I can even think of for such a system in any case is allowing players to disguise themselves as other players. […] If you merely want disguises without the ability to impersonate other players, you don't need a description/memory/introduction system for PCs. If all NPCs are given descriptions instead of names (which is fitting, because they are supposed to be the background fluff to the players), then letting a player specify a random description works. So long as the NPCs are relatively active and interesting, it shouldn't be too obvious when an NPC is really a PC in disguise. With named NPCs it becomes a bit harder to pull off since the NPC in that case is generally going to have some kind of known behavior and speech pattern that will make a PC imposter stand out.

You also could create alternate personas. You could be the savior of humanity to one group and an evil cultist necromancer to your crazy cultist followers. There's also disguising yourself as someone else, for information gathering, spying or other purposes. Concealing your identity, to avoid people who may be looking for you for whatever reason. Concealing your race from players/mobs hostile to your race. Masquerading as another race, for people/mobs favorable to that other race. And that's just off the top of my head. It also helps to blur the line between players and mobs, which I'm all for. The method you suggested would allow players to fade into the "background" with the unimportant mobs, but it would make it difficult for them to masquerade as important people, and would still leave mobs as a relatively ignorable quantity. With an introduction system, a quiet entity with a description could be either a boring, ignorable mob, or a player who hasn't done anything yet, which, I would think, would make the whole process more interesting because they may eventually act. An introduction system intermingles mobs in the background with players by default, rather than making it something that requires a specific skill.

elanthis said:
The only real use I can even think of for such a system in any case is allowing players to disguise themselves as other players. That opens a whole can of worms you DO NOT WANT to deal with in any kind of social situation, and I'm dead serious about that. You might want to pretend that characters and players are two separate people, but they're not. If I logged into a MUD I was playing with my fiance and her character walked up to me and told me she was sleeping with someone else, there would be trouble. It might not be serious trouble (I'd ask my fiance about it, she'd claim it wasn't her, and that'd be the end of it), but even that little bit of friction transfered from the game to real life is unacceptable… and it WILL happen. I've been playing far, far too many social games for far too long to believe otherwise.

This sounds like an appeal to cater to the lowest common denominator. If the character and the player are not different entities, I fail to see how it is roleplaying, and if we're not discussing roleplaying, your objection seems fairly out of context for a roleplaying game mechanic. The example you gave is fairly questionable too. Your fiances's character is sleeping with someone else, and that's an issue? That's somehow a breach of trust? By that line of thinking, if I write a novel where two characters sleep together, that would be masturbation? If a relative designed the other character, is that incest? That makes no sense. If we're talking about out-of-character communication, then I agree that an introduction system and masquerading as other players is probably questionable. And if your fiance's character is telling you what your fiance is doing, that doesn't sound much like roleplaying to me. My guess is that you're objecting to the intermingling of OOC issues with IC game mechanics, to which I also object, but it has nothing to do with the game mechanics in question.

Friction from games can carry over to real life, but it is the responsibility of the players to handle games maturely, not the game designers/administrators. I've played games with people who can't differentiate between games and life, and it turns the game into a chore, not a game. The last thing on my list of any game I would design would be to cater to such players. I'd rather drive them off. To be clear, I'm not saying that no carry-over ever takes place among "mature" players, just that it makes no more sense to get mad at a person for what their character did than it makes sense for me to be mad at J. Michael Straczynski for killing Kosh. (Which is not to say that I'm not mad about it, but it would be stupid for him to have to take such things into consideration when writing)

[Edit: Reflecting on this further, I've managed to think up a few situations where this could cause problems, but I still maintain that it is the responsibility of the players to handle things maturely, and not the designers/administration to sanitize it for them. In my rather less than humble opinion, the administration only needs to point out to individual players that such things can happen, and even then, I'd consider it a courtesy. My above comments also assumed that some sort of sex game mechanic existed, such as KaVir mentioned the original God Wars having, it may or may not be weirder or more objectionable in other contexts. In either event, if you can't ask your fiance/spouse/etc about something her character/an imposter said without it being 'trouble', I think that is a sign of problems that have nothing to do with games and will appear in other areas as well.]

elanthis said:
If dead set on this, then at the very least force PC descriptions to be unique. If you have a wide range of available descriptive attributes, you can easily guarantee that no two players are both given the same short description ever.

I agree with this, probably for different reasons, but I don't think it's particularly possible with a large playerbase. My reason for avoiding duplicate descriptions would be that it would make the game look stale and probably chintzy to have a lot of duplicate descriptions. It'd also make book-keeping annoying. It'd be nice if players could key a description and have it be as valid as a normal mud's name as long as that player wasn't concealed/disguised. It gets weird with certain equipment though. Visors, hoods, that sort of thing.
04 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
Note-worthy people should be notable to the player, the mud only needs to provide a vehicle for retrieving information that eases the player's tracking of that data.

"All we need is <…>" … well, sure, but… how exactly do we do this while providing a sane interface? (Never mind preserving immersion, etc.)

Tonitrus said:
If a player doesn't bother to "remember" or "name" a player who robbed him 3 days ago, why should anyone care if he forgets all but the basic description?

Yes, well, except that IRL a whole lot of this is implicit. You don't need to sit down and "remember" the person, you just remember.

Tonitrus said:
Friction from games can carry over to real life, but it is the responsibility of the players to handle games maturely, not the game designers/administrators.

I think the point was simply that you don't need mechanisms that create friction with little gain.
04 Jan, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
Just to show what kinds of role playing deception are possible, even with everyone knowing the player's names….

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Eve-Onlin...

It's worth noting that CCP (the company that runs EVE) encourages this kind of thing, to some degree. That is, as long as what you do is not using any exploits, and isn't harassment, it's part of the game. It's also been the case that people have spent months infiltrating a rival corporation by gaining the trust of the CEO and eventually getting access to their assets, only to turn and wipe them out.

One thing EVE does that I totally approve of for ALL MMO games, is that your employment history tracks every time you join (or leave) a corporation. At a glance, you can see if the newbie wanting to join used to be part of a rival alliance, or has been jumping from one corp to another every few weeks.
04 Jan, 2010, Scandum wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
I don't see why this would be the case. Note-worthy people should be notable to the player, the mud only needs to provide a vehicle for retrieving information that eases the player's tracking of that data. If a player doesn't bother to "remember" or "name" a player who robbed him 3 days ago, why should anyone care if he forgets all but the basic description?

That pretty much sums it up. It's possible a male elf walks in, robs you, and runs out before you can enter 'remember male elf as male elf robber' - but then again it's hard to remember someone in real life if events happen particularly quickly, not to mention the male elf robbing you might already be remembered as 'alcoholic male elf' if he frequents the same bar as you. Next you can add a command to describe someone you remember to someone else: Joe describes an alcoholic male elf to you, the description matches someone you know as Bubba.
05 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
It's possible a male elf walks in, robs you, and runs out before you can enter 'remember male elf as male elf robber' - but then again it's hard to remember someone in real life if events happen particularly quickly, not to mention the male elf robbing you might already be remembered as 'alcoholic male elf' if he frequents the same bar as you. Next you can add a command to describe someone you remember to someone else: Joe describes an alcoholic male elf to you, the description matches someone you know as Bubba.

What people also don't tend to realize is that memory is pretty unreliable. However, in this case, I would recommend erring on the side of kindness and have it work something more like:

prompt> look
You are in a room with a really cool description that shows that the builder is a creative genius and makes you want to shout his praises on high and never alter his area in any way even if it has bugs that break the whole game for the next 20 years.
[Exits: west north]

Some fat guy walks in from the west.
Some fat guy bumps into you.
Some fat guy walks north.

You notice that your wallet is missing.

prompt> look guy

You do not see that here.

You yell 'Help! I was robbed!'

A tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard walks in from the west.

A tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard asks 'Do you remember anything about the thief?'

prompt> remember

You recently encountered:
some fat guy [a minute ago]
a tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard [still here]

prompt> recall guy
Some fat guy was wearing leotards and a tin-foil hat. He has aquamarine hair and a tattoo of a chainsaw on his forehead.

prompt> remember guy as the thief who stole your wallet
You remember some fat guy as 'the thief who stole your wallet'.

prompt> describe thief guard
You describe the thief who stole your wallet to the guard.

A tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard yells 'Guards, guards!'

A drunken lanky guard stumbles in.
An annoyingly chipper guard prances in.

A tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard describes the thief who stole your wallet to the guards.

A tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard yells 'By the power of hyphens!'

A tough-looking but totally harmless fantasy-style red-shirt guard walks north.
A drunken lanky guard stumbles north.
An annoyingly chipper guard prances north.



And then they go in pursuit of great justice and whatnot. The recent memory could last for anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on how long it takes players to stop freaking out and memorize/describe their attacker. I suppose you could also permanently auto-remember everyone, but that seems like a waste of resources, when <10% of those encountered will be worth remembering in this way.

I guess maybe you could also have a config option where people auto-remember everyone, but give them a limit of 20 or 50 or something, so if they don't clear out irrelevent entries on their own, the game will just delete the oldest. I guess you could auto-remember certain things by generated names as I mentioned before, but I'm not sure I like the idea of encouraging people to rely on that, as oversights could lead to people forgetting things they should auto-remember.

There is realism in allowing quick strikes to go unremembered, but I'd avoid encouraging such things. I've played a number of muds where pk works by getting the upper-hand by moving quickly, and it often turns into safe, blink, dying, dead. I'd rather have some sort of perception/memory stat to adding things to the recently encoutered list and allow things like disguises to screw with it. I'd prefer to encourage people to spend time working on disguising/concealing themselves rather than encourage them to spam commands that exploit weaknesses in the MUD genre. Also people can be intermittently AFK, and while I don't want to protect AFK people too much, I would like to give them a bit of wiggle-room, since such things are both common and partially unavoidable.
05 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
I don't see why this would be the case.


I'm not sure which of the few points and examples in the paragraphs you quoted are being referred to here.

If you're talking about the automatic remembering of important people, it's automatic fail. You cannot come up with a system that works. Try it, try your hardest.

If you're saying you don't see a problem with the MUD not remembering people for you in a world of short half-assed and wholly unsatisfactory descriptions (even a single glance at a person in real life will give you far, far, far more information about said person than a single sentence ever could), the problem is simply that you can't possibly hope to process all those short descriptions in a satisfactory manner in a MUD that has more than a handful of core players… and even with that handful, you end up having to type in long commands like "nick Jerk short fat elf". I have better things to do with my time, and so do most other MUD players.

Quote
You also could create alternate personas. You could be the savior of humanity to one group and an evil cultist necromancer to your crazy cultist followers.


So allow multiple personas. You don't need a complicate description/nick system for this. Just let the player switch his active name from his list of registered names (which are forced to be unique just like any other player name in any regular MUD).

Quote
There's also disguising yourself as someone else, for information gathering, spying or other purposes.


Which was my example about a social intrigue MUD.

Quote
Concealing your identity, to avoid people who may be looking for you for whatever reason.


Same as personas, or allowing the player to look like a mob.

Quote
Concealing your race from players/mobs hostile to your race.


Why do you need a nick system for this? Have a disguise skill. When the player looks at you, show an alternative description based on use of said skill. Mobs don't look at textual description but look at the coded attributes of the player, so again this is irrelevant to any kind of nick system.

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It also helps to blur the line between players and mobs, which I'm all for.


And which is largely impossible until you figure out how to create human-like AI for mobs with natural speech capabilities.

Quote
The method you suggested would allow players to fade into the "background" with the unimportant mobs, but it would make it difficult for them to masquerade as important people, and would still leave mobs as a relatively ignorable quantity. With an introduction system, a quiet entity with a description could be either a boring, ignorable mob, or a player who hasn't done anything yet, which, I would think, would make the whole process more interesting because they may eventually act.


Up until you realize that any player with a brain can just poke quiet people to see if they get a mob response, no response (which would be bad for mobs and make them unlifelike, something I figure you wouldn't want), or a non-mob response.

Quote
An introduction system intermingles mobs in the background with players by default, rather than making it something that requires a specific skill.


Which is wholly bad design on a number of reasons because the general infeasibility of it. From a pure RP perspective, it's a great ideal to strive for. From a realistic game design standpoint it does nothing but hinder usability, increase UI complexity, overload contextual indicators, and treats player as idiots who can't tell the difference between a human called "short fat elf" and a mob called "short fat elf" (which will be painfully obvious the first time the actor does anything at all, in most cases).

Quote
This sounds like an appeal to cater to the lowest common denominator. If the character and the player are not different entities, I fail to see how it is roleplaying, and if we're not discussing roleplaying, your objection seems fairly out of context for a roleplaying game mechanic. The example you gave is fairly questionable too. Your fiances's character is sleeping with someone else, and that's an issue?


The avatar said the words, but in this case it was implied that the avatar was speaking out of character. You can pretend other people are role-playing 100% of the time, but over in reality-land, that isn't how it works. If the avatar said, "Fenron the Fearless, I am sleeping with Gorgoth the Barbarian," that's clearly different than the avatar saying, "Sean, I'm sleeping with Jeff."

And role-playing is NOT an excuse. Period. Do you want your girlfriend getting onto a chat room and "cybering" with other guys? Sure, it's not _real_, but be honest: are you okay with that?

I've seen people pull that role-playing excuse for all sorts of stupid, dishonest shit. I've seen girls fuck other guys at LARPs and claim it was "in character" and not cheating. Doesn't work that way. Having an Internet Romance over a MUD "in character" is no different at all than having any other kind of Internet Romance, and I'd toss her ass out of my house for either one.

Quote
By that line of thinking, if I write a novel where two characters sleep together, that would be masturbation?


If it's a "Mary-Sue" novel, then yes, yes it is. ;)

Quote
My guess is that you're objecting to the intermingling of OOC issues with IC game mechanics, to which I also object, but it has nothing to do with the game mechanics in question.


Except that nothing forces people do use any given communication method purely IC or OCC. Reality does not follow your ideas of good gamesmanship just because you want it. Sorry.

Quote
I agree with this, probably for different reasons, but I don't think it's particularly possible with a large playerbase.


It is incredibly possible, although the odds of getting a description the player is really in love with will likely diminish over time. You simply need a decent set of possible attributes, each with a decent number of variations, and then pick 2-4 for each player. With 20 different attributes (no at all hard to come up with) and 20 different variations for each (some are easy to get that number, some not), and 3 attributes per player, you have over 50,000,000 possible combinations to choose from (I think – Statistics was the one C grade I've ever had). At only 10 possible attributes of 5 values each, you still have something like 90,000 permutations, which is more than enough for most MUDs… and you can always expand if you get close to running out.

There are so many attributes to choose from. You can start with the obvious: race, gender, eye color, hair color, skin color, hair length, height, weight, build. You can expand on there with facial hair, hair style, gait, facial features, distinguishing marks, smell, demeanor… just keep going. Some of those have relatively limited options (gender being the most limited, I think), while others have so many potential values to allow. Be creative and complete. Think of a description you'd write for a character, and add anything necessary to the list.

The only real purpose of the separation of attributes and values is just to make sure no character has two values for the same attribute set, e.g. you don't get a "short tall grisly man" :)

Quote
My reason for avoiding duplicate descriptions would be that it would make the game look stale and probably chintzy to have a lot of duplicate descriptions. It'd also make book-keeping annoying.


It also makes it unplayable. If you have six people in the room all called "short fat elf" then you're stuck referring to them using the number system, which is one of the absolute most annoying things about most MUDs in general. People aren't good at numbers, they're good at words (and even better at images, but meh).

Quote
It'd be nice if players could key a description and have it be as valid as a normal mud's name as long as that player wasn't concealed/disguised. It gets weird with certain equipment though. Visors, hoods, that sort of thing.


The description should be coded programmatically. If you want a disguise system that's fine, but force the player to pick from the coded attributes and values. That avoids a number of potential issues, and it also makes it so that the MUD can very easily work with hoods and such, since the MUD can easily know that certain attributes are hidden when using certain equipment.

By far I think the most complex attributes to deal with in that case is hair and skin color, and then only if you're being really strict. With hair you have to worry about length (if the hair is long, the hair may be visible even with a hood or helmet), and with skin color you have to worry about whether any part of the skin is visible or not. If you're thinking, "that's not hard to deal with," then you successfully have gotten my point. :)
05 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
Elanthis said:
I've seen people pull that role-playing excuse for all sorts of stupid, dishonest shit. I've seen girls fuck other guys at LARPs and claim it was "in character" and not cheating.

Err, point taken etc., but surely we all agree that the action is rather different once you stick "LA" in front of the "RP".

Elanthis said:
With 20 different attributes (no at all hard to come up with) and 20 different variations for each (some are easy to get that number, some not), and 3 attributes per player, you have over 50,000,000 possible combinations to choose from (I think – Statistics was the one C grade I've ever had).

I believe that you did 20^3 * 20*19*18 = 54,720,000. An alternate way of saying this is: 20_choose_1*20 * 19_choose_1*20 * 18_choose_1*20. This is incorrect because the first three 20's are overcounting; you're assuming that choosing the attributes <eyes, hair, height> is different from choosing the attributes <hair, height, eyes>.

The correct formulation is (20_choose_3) * 20^3 = 20!/(3!*17!) * 20^3 = (20*19*18)/(3*2) * 20^3 = 20^4 * 19 * 18 / 6 = 9,120,000.
Intuitively speaking, you get 20 choices for the first attribute, 19 choices for the second attribute and 18 choices for the third attribute; each attribute then gets 20 choices. But, you need to divide the first attribute choice by three and the second attribute choice by two in order to remove the duplicates introduced by selecting in a different order. See also the combinatorial interpretation of the binomial coefficient.
05 Jan, 2010, Lyanic wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
With 20 different attributes (no at all hard to come up with) and 20 different variations for each (some are easy to get that number, some not), and 3 attributes per player, you have over 50,000,000 possible combinations to choose from (I think – Statistics was the one C grade I've ever had).

You should be happy to know that your math is correct. I got an answer of 54.72mil (20^3 * P(20,3) = 8000 * 6840 = 54720000) for the first part. The 90k is also dead on (5^3 * P(10,3)). Why the C in Statistics?

Edit: David's answer differs. Are combinations and permutations being mixed up here? I thought combination = value in set can be repeated. This is not desired here.

Additional Edit: Yep. Wikipedia article on Permutation has a minor error in it. That's what I get for going just on "permutation" without thinking about it, then trusting Wikipedia (especially without reading the whole article).

Third Edit: *STABS POST + STABS SPELLING ERRORS*

Fourth Edit for self and future users: Just check Wolfram Alpha from now on… http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cho...
05 Jan, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
Lyanic said:
elanthis said:
With 20 different attributes (no at all hard to come up with) and 20 different variations for each (some are easy to get that number, some not), and 3 attributes per player, you have over 50,000,000 possible combinations to choose from (I think – Statistics was the one C grade I've ever had).

You should be happy to know that your math is correct. I got an answer of 54.72mil (20^3 * P(20,3) = 8000 * 6840 = 54720000) for the first part. The 90k is also dead on (5^3 * P(10,3)). Why the C in Statistics?

David's answer differs. Are combinations and permutations being mixed up here? I thought combination = value in set can be repeated. This is not desired here.

The 'C' function (choose) does not allow repeated elements. See also the page I linked to and search for 'repetition'. In particular, choosing k elements from n with repetition is C(n+k-1,k).
05 Jan, 2010, donky wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
Text is an incredibly limiting medium. Graphics are the way to go for this kind of complex relationship based purely on the mind's visual processing capabilities. You can add introduction systems to a MUD, but they will always be clunky, require extra work, add extra confusion, and (in my opinion, at least) don't add a damn thing to the game worth any of that.


You may be right. I have implemented introduction systems, but the MUDs never opened, so whether the ways in which we approached them would have worked out better than you describe, I do not know. Out of curiosity, have you implemented introduction systems? Have you worked on a MUD which has them?
05 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
I'm not sure which of the few points and examples in the paragraphs you quoted are being referred to here.

I think I misunderstood what you meant by fail. Your comparison to a game with a terrible soundtrack being unplayable lead me to believe that you were saying that the whole mud would fail if I attempted a design that would track knowledge, not that that the tracking itself will fail. The tracking will fail, at least some of the time, I don't dispute that.

elanthis said:
the problem is simply that you can't possibly hope to process all those short descriptions in a satisfactory manner in a MUD that has more than a handful of core players… and even with that handful, you end up having to type in long commands like "nick Jerk short fat elf". I have better things to do with my time, and so do most other MUD players.

Like grinding away at levels and equipment?

At any rate, I'm still entertaining this idea, but I'm not wholly sold on it, so I'm not going to comment on several of your other comments until I've thought about them more.

elanthis said:
Quote
It also helps to blur the line between players and mobs, which I'm all for.


And which is largely impossible until you figure out how to create human-like AI for mobs with natural speech capabilities.


elanthis said:
Quote
The method you suggested would allow players to fade into the "background" with the unimportant mobs, but it would make it difficult for them to masquerade as important people, and would still leave mobs as a relatively ignorable quantity. With an introduction system, a quiet entity with a description could be either a boring, ignorable mob, or a player who hasn't done anything yet, which, I would think, would make the whole process more interesting because they may eventually act.


Up until you realize that any player with a brain can just poke quiet people to see if they get a mob response, no response (which would be bad for mobs and make them unlifelike, something I figure you wouldn't want), or a non-mob response.


I did say 'help', not 'magically cause'. If I were to walk into a room with 5-10 people with descriptions, not knowing any of them, I wouldn't poke each of them in turn to see if any had some sort of auto-response mob tell or some such thing. If I did try to talk to them, the mob AI issue would brutally crush the immersion. I'm not convinced that this is an insurmountable issue, however. If there were some sort of social combat system or something to that effect, or another way to interface with both mobs and players, this could be smudged a bit more.

Supposing, for example, I were to make a "directions" social/command.

prompt> directions elf darkhaven

You ask the arrogant-looking elf for directions.

The arrogant-looking elf says 'Darkhaven is 3 miles to the east.'

Part of immersion is willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the player, if the player isn't willing, there's nothing you can do to help. The goal as game designers should be to reduce situations where the player is unwittingly shocked out of such a state.

And, for reference, I don't consider it unlifelike for a mob to mostly ignore random socials. When I poke random people on a mud, I often get things like the eyebrow social, etc, and sometimes completely ignored, especially with idlers. Mobs could also have timered triggers with cooldowns so they don't insta-respond.

elanthis said:
Quote
An introduction system intermingles mobs in the background with players by default, rather than making it something that requires a specific skill.


Which is wholly bad design on a number of reasons because the general infeasibility of it. From a pure RP perspective, it's a great ideal to strive for. From a realistic game design standpoint it does nothing but hinder usability, increase UI complexity, overload contextual indicators, and treats player as idiots who can't tell the difference between a human called "short fat elf" and a mob called "short fat elf" (which will be painfully obvious the first time the actor does anything at all, in most cases).


The goal would be to make it harder to determine, not guarentee complete success. If people can be fooled 5-10% of the time, that's good enough for me. And the point isn't necessarilly to fool the players, only to blur the distinction. A mud I played had players enforce the laws. The Justice cabal would kill people who fought in the main city. But you could attack mobs. Stuff like that always annoys me. As for the usability comment, I'm not sure that you're wrong about that, it may be a wasted effort. I would like to add that I don't think graphical games would be any different in these situations. The MMORPGs I've seen just tag a line of text alongside the character's …avatar? displaying their name. If you didn't display that, the same confusion would occur when different people utilize the same avatars. This is not a question of the limits of muds as a medium, but rather a question of the limits of games as a medium. Our brains are way too complicated to begin to simulate with any real accuracy. The goal should be to reach an acceptable smudge.

elanthis said:
Quote
This sounds like an appeal to cater to the lowest common denominator. If the character and the player are not different entities, I fail to see how it is roleplaying, and if we're not discussing roleplaying, your objection seems fairly out of context for a roleplaying game mechanic. The example you gave is fairly questionable too. Your fiances's character is sleeping with someone else, and that's an issue?


The avatar said the words, but in this case it was implied that the avatar was speaking out of character. You can pretend other people are role-playing 100% of the time, but over in reality-land, that isn't how it works. If the avatar said, "Fenron the Fearless, I am sleeping with Gorgoth the Barbarian," that's clearly different than the avatar saying, "Sean, I'm sleeping with Jeff."

And role-playing is NOT an excuse. Period. Do you want your girlfriend getting onto a chat room and "cybering" with other guys? Sure, it's not _real_, but be honest: are you okay with that?

I've seen people pull that role-playing excuse for all sorts of stupid, dishonest shit. I've seen girls fuck other guys at LARPs and claim it was "in character" and not cheating. Doesn't work that way. Having an Internet Romance over a MUD "in character" is no different at all than having any other kind of Internet Romance, and I'd toss her ass out of my house for either one.

If I had any sense at all, I'd leave this section alone.

The intermingling of IC/OOC aspect of an introduction system is a wholly separate issue, which, as far as I'm concerned, falls under the category of 'not my problem'. People can use ventriloquate to do such things too, I don't suppose ventriloquate should be removed?

At the risk of being tiresome, I'd like to point out that several, severely differing, degrees of "roleplayed sex" have been thrown out, which may or may not have various levels of objectability. As far as I'm concerned, they're all 'not my problem'. The LARP girl you mentioned, for example. Someone created that game. Provided he wasn't directly observing the act in question, is it in any way his responsibility? No.

I had a friend that used to hang out on my smaug hackery/build-port and I jokingly made a "statutory rape" social and used it on her. If that social were to exist in a roleplayed game, it could qualify as an act of sex. I would think that would be wholly different than emoting out explicit sex sequences. In addition, there's also a fair amount of poetic license with roleplaying in general. Two friends of mine have characters that are together, but I'm pretty sure they've never acted out graphic sex scenes, it's just assumed/left in the background.

elanthis said:
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My guess is that you're objecting to the intermingling of OOC issues with IC game mechanics, to which I also object, but it has nothing to do with the game mechanics in question.


Except that nothing forces people do use any given communication method purely IC or OCC. Reality does not follow your ideas of good gamesmanship just because you want it. Sorry.

After my mud is completed (roughly 200 years from now), my next project will be to subjegate all of reality to my will to avoid this sort of thing. In the meantime I would probably just ban people who intermingle OOC/IC and/or just close the whole thing down and switch to designing single-player games.

elanthis said:
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My reason for avoiding duplicate descriptions would be that it would make the game look stale and probably chintzy to have a lot of duplicate descriptions. It'd also make book-keeping annoying.


It also makes it unplayable. If you have six people in the room all called "short fat elf" then you're stuck referring to them using the number system, which is one of the absolute most annoying things about most MUDs in general. People aren't good at numbers, they're good at words (and even better at images, but meh).

I don't have anything to add about this, I just wanted to bitch about having to type 3.sword, 5.elf, and so on. I hate that crap.

elanthis said:
The description should be coded programmatically. If you want a disguise system that's fine, but force the player to pick from the coded attributes and values. That avoids a number of potential issues, and it also makes it so that the MUD can very easily work with hoods and such, since the MUD can easily know that certain attributes are hidden when using certain equipment.

By far I think the most complex attributes to deal with in that case is hair and skin color, and then only if you're being really strict. With hair you have to worry about length (if the hair is long, the hair may be visible even with a hood or helmet), and with skin color you have to worry about whether any part of the skin is visible or not. If you're thinking, "that's not hard to deal with," then you successfully have gotten my point. :)

I assume you mean that these descriptions change over time, which I am in favor of, although I'm not certain the whole system isn't kludgey.

The hair and skin will be a nightmare. Eyes could be too. I'm assuming that means I did not get your point.

———

Anyway, it sounds like we're both arm-chair philosophizing about a system that neither of us have used. I certainly haven't played a mud that has such a system, and your comments have sounded theoretical as well, so I'd like to ask people with experience with such systems to weigh in on the points brought up thus far.
05 Jan, 2010, Twisol wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
The LARP girl you mentioned, for example. Someone created that game. Provided he wasn't directly observing the act in question, is it in any way his responsibility? No.

I'm not about to get involved in this discussion, but I felt obliged to point this out… LARP is, by definition, Live Action Role Play. This means it's actually acted out IRL. When you say "Someone created that game", it makes me wonder if you think that a LARP is just another kind of RPG.
05 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
I'm aware of what LARP stands for/is, and I meant "game" in the sense of the particular setting that the characters were in, not whatever mechanics governed the game.

In other words, whoever created the backstory is not responsible for the act in question. (Nor is whoever created the game mechanics, if such existed)

On the other hand, isn't it just another kind of RPG? You're roleplaying, which probably qualifies as a game, being live-action shouldn't preclude it from being an RPG.
05 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
We seem mostly in agreement on technical aspects besides one, and differ purely in opinion on what is acceptable or fun in terms of role-playing. I disagree, but not in any way that can be objectively argued further. :)

To touch lightly on the in-character sex thing again: everyone has lines. Mine may be far more conservative than yours. There are wives who think their husband is cheating on them when they look at a Playboy, and there are guys who are totally willing to let friends bang their girlfriends because they think it's hot. Whatever the medium of RP is, there is no such thing as "what happens in character stays in character." Every act you take in character is an act you decided on in your own actual real-life head. Every decision you make in-character is, in some way, driven by real-life thoughts and desires. RPing in a MUD is just another form of Internet chatting (one with some form of rules and topical structure imposed, but then in theory is a Christian Support chatroom), and plenty of people start romances over the Internet. As a closely-related anecdote, I had a girlfriend some years back leave me for a local member of her WoW guild that she had been friends with for some six months while we were dating, because she thought he was cooler because he played WoW and went to Blizzcon and OMG he plays an elf in a LARP. (and on a related note: don't do that, people. as I heard from her friends, that guy did NOT do well by her at all, and I almost feel a little sorry for her… almost. the internet is a scary place and romance does not belong there.)

On the RPG vs LARP thing, keep in mind that Final Fantasy is classified as an RPG even though you do absolutely not a single bit of Role Playing of any kind in those games, at least not any more than you do in Doom. "Hey, I'm playing the role of a space marine trapped on Mars killing demons… this is totally an RPG!" :) Likewise, kids playing Cowboys and Indians are also Role Playing, so that must be an RPG, too. Man, just about every game except Tetris seems to be an RPG of some kind. ;) There's no real definition or clear line, but generally RPGs are considered games with mechanics that control character progression focused primarily on mechanics and rules, while LARPs are considered social experiences defined by improvisational acting and theatrics using mechanics and rules to define the limits of what the actors can do. Some people call LARPs RPGs (NERO calls itself an RPG, for example) while other people claim they are different. The only way I can think of to define them as separate would be to claim that in an RPG you control or direct a separate avatar or imaginary character while in a LARP you have no avatar and no imaginary entity, but that's not a formal definition of any kind. To sum up… yeah, LARPs are RPGs, but don't go trying to make everyone else agree with that statement unless you really like pissing people off. :)

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The hair and skin will be a nightmare. Eyes could be too. I'm assuming that means I did not get your point.


They're not that hard at all. Each attribute has some simple meta-data noting which body locations it entails. Equipment has meta-data noting which body locations it covers. If all of the body locations of a particular description attribute are covered, the attribute is hidden; otherwise, it is visible. You may need stacking to deal with hair (and nothing else that I can think of… maybe a tail, but that's a little iffy), but then if you're writing a game that wants to focus on descriptive elements, I'd assume you already have a versatile equipment system that deals with stacking. If not, I believe Tyche had some notes on his personal website about how to handle that in a pretty simple fashion, take a look at them.
05 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
To touch lightly on the in-character sex thing again: everyone has lines. Mine may be far more conservative than yours.

Probably not more or less conservative, merely different. I am completely intolerant of deception, for example, to a severely "unreasonable" point. So the examples you listed would probably not bother me if I was told up front, but much more minor things would drive me insane if I was lied to about them. Except the LARP thing, seriously, wtf. I guess that falls under "dishonesty", though, or maybe "too stupid to live".

As I semi-related aside, I personally would be highly reluctant to add any sort of sexually explicit game mechanics, because I think it would bring up a lot of the problems that you've mentioned, and I really can't see it ever being worth the trouble. I suppose if I went crazier than usual and decided to implement some sort of pregnancy system, it could be done in a PG manner, but I'm not sure it would be worth the trouble either. (As a hilarious note, I read something somewhere about a mud that had such a thing where some guy's in-game wife had someone else's son, and he went nuts and nearly started a war. From a roleplaying perspective, that's either really great or really bad. I haven't really decided which, but I'm guessing OOC drama ensued as well, and I can't stand that crap.)

elanthis said:
Whatever the medium of RP is, there is no such thing as "what happens in character stays in character." Every act you take in character is an act you decided on in your own actual real-life head. Every decision you make in-character is, in some way, driven by real-life thoughts and desires.

I'm not sure how to respond to this. Whatever I want to say is very emphatic. I suppose I am ambivalent. If I punch my friend in the nose, that will likely upset him. If we are playing Smash Brothers Melee and I punch him in the nose in the game, that can't really be construed as the same thing. If I punch him in the game, I do so to win, or because it's funny. If I do that in real life, even for the same reasons, he will probably not react as well. This would tend to disagree with what you've said. When I'm roleplaying a character, I try to rewire my thinking to mesh with that character. Bits always show through, and there's some things the brain just won't segregate in that way. I don't see myself getting involved in any mudsex, whatever my character's views or would-be views on the subject may be. This would tend to support your statement. Or perhaps my first example was flawed, because punching him in the game does not cause lingering harm, whereas his nose would conceivably hurt for awhile if I punched him in real life.

That's all I can really think of to say about this, which is a pity, because it is an issue which I am interested in but have not been able to form a reasonable stance on.

I think it's pretty obvious that they're not the same in any sort of 1:1 sense. I think it's also pretty obvious that they're not unrelated.

elanthis said:
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The hair and skin will be a nightmare. Eyes could be too. I'm assuming that means I did not get your point.


They're not that hard at all. Each attribute has some simple meta-data noting which body locations it entails. Equipment has meta-data noting which body locations it covers. If all of the body locations of a particular description attribute are covered, the attribute is hidden; otherwise, it is visible. You may need stacking to deal with hair (and nothing else that I can think of… maybe a tail, but that's a little iffy), but then if you're writing a game that wants to focus on descriptive elements, I'd assume you already have a versatile equipment system that deals with stacking. If not, I believe Tyche had some notes on his personal website about how to handle that in a pretty simple fashion, take a look at them.

Most of my designs are hypothetical. My code so far lets people log into an account, then ignores them. The reason I think that hair/skin will be an issue is things like:

I have long scraggly hair. I am wearing a hat. The hat is on the "head" location. Therefore you can't see my hair. However, with long scraggly hair, it should be visible anyway. Or I have short hair, but am wearing a crown. The crown covers up my head, therefore you can't see my hair, even though you should be able to with a crown. I guess the long hair could cover the head and neck locations, or perhaps head, neck, and back. But then what about the crown over short hair?

Unrelatedly, thanks for directing me to Tyche's site, seems pretty awesome.

(Also unrelatedly, I wish I could find a way to use vim keybindings to make these posts so I stop typing "j"s all throughout them. Please ignore any I missed.)
06 Jan, 2010, elanthis wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
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I'm not sure how to respond to this. Whatever I want to say is very emphatic. I suppose I am ambivalent. If I punch my friend in the nose, that will likely upset him. If we are playing Smash Brothers Melee and I punch him in the nose in the game, that can't really be construed as the same thing. If I punch him in the game, I do so to win, or because it's funny.


I did not say that in-character actions are equivalent to real-world actions. Only that the actions you take in-character are reflective of real-world desires. I can make assumptions on your personality (very broadly and largely inaccurate, but with some kernel of truth) based on the fact that you like playing head-to-head against friends in Smash Bros vs preferring a cooperative game like New Super Mario Bros Wii. (RP and playing a fighting game are also rather different beasts, of course… just like playing a social RP MUD is a different experience and a different set of behavioral expectations than playing on a PvP MUD.)

If for example you tend to always play evil guys who kills other players for being in your way in an RP MUD, we can tell various things about you. We know that – even if you are FANTASTIC at role-playing the evil guy in a very convincing manner – uncaring as to whether or not you frustrate or anger other players who weren't interested in being killed just for being unlucky enough for running into you. You are not a griefer, but you are a totally different style of player than the person who plays a leader and teacher and helps out everyone he runs into any way he can. Again, it has nothing to do with whether or not you are acting 100% in-character, but what characters you choose to play and how you choose to play them. If you flirt with every person you meet in character, this belies at least some small desire on your part to be flirtatious. The characters you portray are an expression of yourself, whether it is a direct expression or something far, far more subtle.

To look at it from a totally different angle, let me ask you this: if you and the people you wish to play with are capable of fully separating IC and OCC behavior, why do you need a disguise or description system at all? If you're playing a human-hating orc and then you see:

Elanthis (totally disguised as an orc) enter Orc Camp.
Elanthis (totally disguised as an orc) says, "the filthy man-things are attacking to the north, we must gather our warriors and rush them now!"
Hobo (totally hiding in the trees to the south) whispers, "okay guys, they're about to run to the north, then we raid the camp!"

then you should (being such a great role-player) have no issue with pretending that Elanthis is an orc and that there's nobody hiding to the south. This is the classic separation of OCC knowledge from IC knowledge that so many role-players claim everyone must be capable of, and yet in every single RP game of any kind I've ever played, it has been proven time and time again that no RPer – even the best I have ever known (and they were fantastic and likely beyond the skills of any MUD players you will have met, believe me) – can really separate that knowledge. That OCC knowledge taints your behavior. You may end up acting in a stupid way because you're trying hard to look like you're not acting on OCC information (I've done this, for example, in a LARP where I-as-Sean knew they were about to run 20 orcs and then I-as-Daedron immediately saw a few guys sneaking through the woods but did not call the alarm, because I was not sure if I was looking in the woods because I-as-Sean knew things would be there or because I-as-Daedron just happened to look in the woods at the right time to see some poorly concealed NPCs), you may end up using the OCC information without consciously realizing it (e.g., being emotionally driven to distrust Elanthis because you for-real know that he's an imposter, and then acting suspicious of this orc when you normally would not have been suspicious), or locking up trying to figure out how to handle the situation without being biased (which is basically impossible).

I am completely confident than it is impossible to separate OCC knowledge from IC behavior in any consistent and "realistic" fashion. That, in turn, makes separating IC knowledge from OCC behavior impossible to truly separate. I again have seen this time and time again in extensive RP scenarios, where a guy who's a jerk IC is thought of as a jerk OCC even though people are saying "yeah he's a nice guy IRL, that's just his character." The emotion transfers. A good RPer logically identifies that fact, but it still transfers and still biases your behavior in some way, even if that way is very subtle.

To come back to my original complaint, identity is critical in any social context. You can claim that the MUD identities are entirely IC, but we as real people associate those IC identities with some OCC person, and the behavior and information we experience IC bias our OCC thinking. That is without any form of explicit breaking of character, which unfortunately you cannot protect against. It's no different than an email phishing scam; imagine if a player disguises himself as a known staff member's character and then does a /whisper someguy Hey, we think there might have been a hack attempt on your account, can you verify your password so I can check? Sure, all the smart players know better, but even one guy who gets screwed because the game made safe identification of authority and OCC credentials impossible. The same goes for my fiance example. Like I originally said, it would be easily cleared up by me just asking her, "hey, someone with your name on the MUD said some crazy stuff, you know what that's all about?" and then we'd identify that some other player has it out for her or something and report him to the staff.

Which brings up a second key part of identification in a game – how DO I report it to the staff? All I can tell them is that someone that looked like my fiance in-game was breaking character. Unless they happen to have very, very extensive logging of all conversations, recipients of all spoken messages, emotes, whispers, tells, and chats, along with time stamps and current name/disguise of all participants, with locations, there's really nothing the game admins can do at that point. There may be a command like /report FianceCharacterName that would look in the current room, see who has that name at the moment, and report that specific account, but what if the imposter fled or logged off before I could type all that crap out? Not everyone types at 100 WPM, even most MUD players.

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I have long scraggly hair. I am wearing a hat. The hat is on the "head" location. Therefore you can't see my hair. However, with long scraggly hair, it should be visible anyway. Or I have short hair, but am wearing a crown. The crown covers up my head, therefore you can't see my hair, even though you should be able to with a crown. I guess the long hair could cover the head and neck locations, or perhaps head, neck, and back. But then what about the crown over short hair?


Just some simple flags. The hair has locations. if it's long, it includes the head, neck, shoulder, back locations (or some subset there-of). The crown has only the head location and has the 'covers location' flag unset. (crowns are generally not as big and bulky as they appear in the movies, at least not in the pre-Rennaissance times – most often a simple circlet would have been used, which covers less than your average headband.)

It will not be fool-proof, but it should be Good Enough. If you have a particularly complicated scenario the system can't solve, either just suck it up or avoid the scenario. If crowns are really that much of a bother for some reason, just don't have crowns. you will be surprised how easy it is to tweak a setting or story idea to work around technical limitations like that. I have said it before and will say it again: your technology MUST support your game setting, and your game setting MUST support your tecnology, or your game is broken. If you can't make the technology support your setting, change the setting so the technology can support it. (this is turn is yet another reason I'm not at all a fan of introduction systems – the technology blows and trying to make a game where the fiction requires that technology is a mistake.)

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(Also unrelatedly, I wish I could find a way to use vim keybindings to make these posts so I stop typing "j"s all throughout them. Please ignore any I missed.)


I have to admit, using the hjkl keybindings for cursor movement is one of the few Vi(m) features I have never cared for. I do have a habit of typing :wq or :%s/blah/ or :new somefile or so on all the time when I'm in MSVC, and then the next day I end up hitting ctrl-S all the time in Vim and keep stopping my console. ;)

(edit to fix a couple typos that made a few sentences mean the opposite of what I intended to say)
06 Jan, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
It's possible a male elf walks in, robs you, and runs out before you can enter 'remember male elf as male elf robber' - but then again it's hard to remember someone in real life if events happen particularly quickly, not to mention the male elf robbing y ou might already be remembered as 'alcoholic male elf' if he frequents the same bar as you. Next you can add a command to describe someone you remember to someone else: Joe describes an alcoholic male elf to you, the description matches someone you know as Bubba.

In my previous mud I had an introduction system, but I expanded it to include a range of other things you could "know" about other characters. Although I never completed the other options, they included various crimes you'd witnessed the character commit - and the idea was that you could indeed pass that information on to others.

This wasn't done for realism, but for gameplay purposes, as it provided a coded mechanism for witnessing and reporting crimes (or bribing or eliminating the witnesses and thus avoiding justice).
06 Jan, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
elanthis said:
This is the classic separation of OCC knowledge from IC knowledge that so many role-players claim everyone must be capable of, and yet in every single RP game of any kind I've ever played, it has been proven time and time again that no RPer – even the best I have ever known (and they were fantastic and likely beyond the skills of any MUD players you will have met, believe me) – can really separate that knowledge. That OCC knowledge taints your behavior.

I was talking about the separation of behaviors, which I will grant that people have difficulty fully separating, but the separation of knowledge is a miserable mess. I don't think it ever works really. When I end up with OOC knowledge like that, I end up doing one of about 4 things:

1) I do whatever is convenient for me out-of-character (lame)
2) I over-compensate in the wrong direction and deliberately sabotage myself in an attempt to act in-character (lame)
3) I spend 5 minutes trying to construct my character's future actions based off his past (headache, which usually results in #4)
4) I choke on the information and can't act until something external gets me out of the damn OOC/IC paradox. (lame)

I've seen other people do #1 and #2 time and time again, I don't know if others do #3 or #4.

elanthis said:
I am completely confident than it is impossible to separate OCC knowledge from IC behavior in any consistent and "realistic" fashion. That, in turn, makes separating IC knowledge from OCC behavior impossible to truly separate. I again have seen this time and time again in extensive RP scenarios, where a guy who's a jerk IC is thought of as a jerk OCC even though people are saying "yeah he's a nice guy IRL, that's just his character." The emotion transfers. A good RPer logically identifies that fact, but it still transfers and still biases your behavior in some way, even if that way is very subtle.

I used to play a mud that didn't have any OOC channels or anything, and it was the policy of the mud that anything OOC was against the rules. Obviously enforcement of that is a bit … difficult. Anyway, players were encouraged to conceal their identities and act through their characters. I was able to deduce after the fact (through forum posts and such things) the identity of a few of the people I interacted with, and it was interesting, because a player who was my friend with one character, who I totally thought the world of, could be my enemy with another character, and be completely hated. And since I had no idea who was playing the character, it was pretty difficult for the OOC knowledge you mentioned to affect me. I think this is a good ideal to strive for.

I should note that an introduction system is wholly unrelated to this, and the mud I am referring to didn't have anything like it.

elanthis said:
Which brings up a second key part of identification in a game – how DO I report it to the staff? All I can tell them is that someone that looked like my fiance in-game was breaking character. Unless they happen to have very, very extensive logging of all conversations, recipients of all spoken messages, emotes, whispers, tells, and chats, along with time stamps and current name/disguise of all participants, with locations, there's really nothing the game admins can do at that point. There may be a command like /report FianceCharacterName that would look in the current room, see who has that name at the moment, and report that specific account, but what if the imposter fled or logged off before I could type all that crap out? Not everyone types at 100 WPM, even most MUD players.

I typed at 90 before I started mudding, now it's more like 0.005 with 90 typoes. Stupid macros. Anyway, that's an excellent question. I have no idea. I hadn't thought about that at all. Which is good, actually, and the reason I make these forum posts, people think of things I don't. Lets see. We could have the mud memory thing previously discussed, which I think was agreed "won't work". It's possible that my recently-encountered memory list will allow people something like a "report" command. Without good logs, even knowing the actual, specific character won't help, though. I suppose you could have some sort of system similar to a "voting" system, where people that get reported a lot get snooped and what not, but that's one of those ideas that sounds good only when you're in a totally delusional mood. Hm.

elanthis said:
I have said it before and will say it again: your technology MUST support your game setting, and your game setting MUST support your tecnology, or your game is broken. If you can't make the technology support your setting, change the setting so the technology can support it. (this is turn is yet another reason I'm not at all a fan of introduction systems – the technology blows and trying to make a game where the fiction requires that technology is a mistake.)


I should really try an RPI or something that uses a system like this and see how I like it, but the whole idea of writing up a complicated character with an involved background to play a game I might not like anyway really grinds my gears.
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