13 Apr, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
I guess I'm just still not getting it. So never mind, I'll be quiet now :smile:
13 Apr, 2009, Davion wrote in the 22nd comment:
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I think the idea is that MUD owners, who are looking for a place to fill in an RP plot would come to this merc (as in mercenary, not to be confused with the Merc codebase) bar and higher people to fill positions in the plot, but kind of make it a little more… rpish. All of this would be handled on a forum (presumably). So it's not necessarily for a specific position on the workforce of the MUD, but instead, sort of a hangout for players who can fill niche roles.
13 Apr, 2009, Kayle wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
You're not alone in not getting it.
16 Apr, 2009, Shigs wrote in the 24th comment:
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Would there be a means of rating Mercs or a merc review system based on past positions filled?
19 Apr, 2009, Jhypsy Shah wrote in the 25th comment:
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Shigs said:
Would there be a means of rating Mercs or a merc review system based on past positions filled?


absolutley. Though it may start of simple, such as a list of deeds. We like to think players help make the world as well. We will be strongly encouraging roleplay and and helping players who want to evolve past the role of hack-n-slashers to do so. We're getting it started here:

http://kingdomofyet.webs.com/apps/forums...
24 Apr, 2009, Athanos wrote in the 26th comment:
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I have read this about 4 times now and I don't get it either.
24 Apr, 2009, Sandi wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
Jhypsy is making a web site where people roleplay in threads on a forum. It's similar to the longstanding roleplay by email games.

He's thinking that some of these roleplayers could roleplay on a MUD/MUSH as part of their storyline.

For instance, the plotline of their thread might be the Princess of the land is under a spell, and the King wants a brave knight to find the potion that will save her. They don't have real potions to find, so he rolls some dice and pretends he found one. Or……

He logs in to a MUD, becomes a Warrior, searches for the Purple Potion in Moria (which will take getting to level 10), and when successful, returns to the forum and announces to the King he has the potion and all is saved. Of course, two Warriors trying to outpace each other would be even more fun.

In short, the idea is to use a bit of MUDding instead of a dice roll. As you might imagine, dice rolls aren't part of most forum software.

Problems? Sure, we can see tons of problems, but they won't get fixed by just pointing at them and laughing. So it's definitely an alpha idea, one without real form yet, but since I have three empty games I figure there might be something to it. Adverts on TMC are worthless these days.

(I'm getting really, really sick of people that "know what a good game" is, they just can't find it.)
(In fact, I'm about ten seconds away from a "TMC is the enemy, the worst thing that ever happened to MUDding!" rant.)
24 Apr, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
I perfectly understand using a MUD to enact some role play. What I don't understand is how the many MUDs and "mercenaries" fit into the picture. I also understand the notion of requesting people to play roles, which would explain part of the mercenary business. But I have the impression that's not really the point.
25 Apr, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
Sandi said:
Jhypsy is making a web site where people roleplay in threads on a forum. It's similar to the longstanding roleplay by email games.

He's thinking that some of these roleplayers could roleplay on a MUD/MUSH as part of their storyline.

For instance, the plotline of their thread might be the Princess of the land is under a spell, and the King wants a brave knight to find the potion that will save her. They don't have real potions to find, so he rolls some dice and pretends he found one. Or……

He logs in to a MUD, becomes a Warrior, searches for the Purple Potion in Moria (which will take getting to level 10), and when successful, returns to the forum and announces to the King he has the potion and all is saved. Of course, two Warriors trying to outpace each other would be even more fun.

In short, the idea is to use a bit of MUDding instead of a dice roll. As you might imagine, dice rolls aren't part of most forum software.


I had actually got the sense that the roleplay would involve hiring coders/builders (mercs) and that the roleplay
arena would be some kind of abstracted "Help Wanted" deal.


Sandi said:
Problems? Sure, we can see tons of problems, but they won't get fixed by just pointing at them and laughing. So it's definitely an alpha idea, one without real form yet, but since I have three empty games I figure there might be something to it. Adverts on TMC are worthless these days.


If I seemed to mock, I apologize. I was (and honestly I think I still am) perplexed at what this thing is all about.
For example, while your explanation does seem to shed some more light on the style, I do feel it's missed
the point of the merc thing, which I got a strong sense had something important to do with hiring people
for help on a mud.

Of course, I could be totally off…and I think that's an important thing.

Roleplay is just fine when it's sandboxed in parameters known to participants and spectators alike.
When it turns out that the context of the sandbox is somehow itself RP, and responses to
questions trying to establish the parameters of the RP are unclear and ring of RP as well….I just
dunno where to start getting a grip on any of this.

I'm not an unusually stupid person, and I have been trying to grok this thing, but I flat out do not.
And like it or not, whether RPers feel they're being judged or not, this is a problem. This forum is
for communication. If you communicate in a way that confounds the sincere efforts of folks to
understand you, and you do it on purpose, I think you're going to eventually run into limits
of people's patience.

At this point, expressions of annoyance would not be RP h8, they would be an entirely justified reaction
to someone communicating in an intentionally unclear manner…even after repeated efforts to
elicit clarifications.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
25 Apr, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
WAIT! I GET IT!

It IS a help wanted RP-bar in the form of a forum thread….but the help wanted is
for ROLEPLAYERS! It's recruiting people to come to a mud to do "scenes" or "posers"
or whatever they're called.

Woohoo!

So that explains this talk of different worlds and stuff…it's a way to have a reality
that accepts the different genres. I make a post saying:

"Greetings I am Kokram from the Bufu Nebula and I require help stealing the Quatloos"

and then some RP'er thinks to himself "hey a scifi posing thing, I will connect to his mud
and play at this, but first I will post in this RP thread in character"

So RPer 2 types like:

"Greeting acknowledged, Kokram, I am Sapphie-9 of the Lethpos, and I shall come to your aid!"

So RPer 2 goes to BufuMOO or whatever and they all have this pose-off and everyone is happy
and comes back to the forum to regale everyone of the fabulous scenes they had.

Right?

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

EDIT: I think I deserve some quest points or something for figuring this out. At least like 1000 XP.
25 Apr, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
Well, that's what I meant about playing extras. I still think there's something I'm not getting though.
25 Apr, 2009, Idealiad wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
No, I think that's pretty much it.

I know it sounds confusing and everything.

On a side note: we were talking over at Mudlab once about creating a persistent browser-based game (like Travian for example) and integrating it with a mud. So you have this big strategic game playing out as a web game does, while people are playing in the mud, and one affects the other. This kind of scratches the itch of those sim/strategy players who might not normally interact with a mud environment. Now imagine you do this and integrate this forum RP thing with the mud.

I don't RP any more, but I think it could get pretty interesting. You would attract all different kinds of players to the same game – but they'd be playing the game they want to play. Yet their actions would contribute to the dynamic of the mud. It'd be like each game would have AI in the form of the other players playing their web game/forum game, all affecting the same game.

Now I'm not making sense :cyclops:
25 Apr, 2009, Sandi wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
No, I think you're making sense.

It's akin to KaVir's frequent suggestion to use RL cycles (such as the stock market) rather than random numbers. Point of fact, while in game design for dice rolls you probably do want random numbers, for much of what is involved in world design we want unpredictable numbers. We can recognise randomness and we know it's boring. What's intriguing is numbers that seem to have a pattern…. maybe….. somehow……

Using another game to steer a plot arc, perhaps having them feed each other, that could be interesting.
25 Apr, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
I see how you could integrate a high-level strategy game with a low-level tactical MUD game. But I don't see how a free-form RP game without a rule system could be tied together with in-game MUD events without a fair bit of human intervention.
25 Apr, 2009, Athanos wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
This is a very interesting concept. I personally have never done any forum RP. Besides pen and paper, the only RP I have done is on a MUD. I think the idea has a lot of potential, but have to agree with David that without human intervention it would be quite difficult to tie together.

I know a couple of people who do the forum RP thing. They enjoy it because there are no hard core set rules and it is very free form. I think it would be very difficult to convince them of the idea. However, there is an audience for every format. Finding them may be like pulling teeth, but they are out there.
25 Apr, 2009, Jhypsy Shah wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
Athanos said:
This is a very interesting concept. I personally have never done any forum RP. Besides pen and paper, the only RP I have done is on a MUD. I think the idea has a lot of potential, but have to agree with David that without human intervention it would be quite difficult to tie together.

I know a couple of people who do the forum RP thing. They enjoy it because there are no hard core set rules and it is very free form. I think it would be very difficult to convince them of the idea. However, there is an audience for every format. Finding them may be like pulling teeth, but they are out there.


Oddly enough there are some MMOs with multi game guilds, but it seems they started doing that in case their game shuts down then they don't lose their guild. Also odd is that they like to share machinima of their battles/duels. I guess it would be like a MUD player capturing their MUD run and editing it into a story, possibly with the same copyright problems, interesting tho' . Some of their members like MUDs too.

There are groups out there that seem to use the same concept, to some extent, for one reason or another. Alot of them seem pretty new and scattered..some of them have been around quite a while. Yet I haven't really found any common ground for them. They all seem to have their own codes and rules and I respect that.

When playing pen and paper, we have taken the players whose characters who had alot of gold and just let them gamble among themselves and with other groups just for fun. We just used a deck of cards, the gold was usually already marked down. Someone might leave with an outstanding debt but that would just be storyline for later.. something like that might be fun on the browser.


Same game, we had a trade wars system in it which was influenced to some extent by random rolls for areas and the DM would just make up reasons why that happened later usually..simular to a stock market but more insane and fun, especially when it crashed. I liked using a little astrology too.

mystery of whatwassaid is solved 1000 xp to be split by all in the thread :D
25 Apr, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 37th comment:
Votes: 0
Jhypsy Shah said:
mystery of whatwassaid is solved 1000 xp to be split by all in the thread :D


Ok, if I got that right, then I have a suggestion.

I think the forum-based recruitment bar is a perfectly serviceable idea.

However it seems to me that a recruitment bar has an implication of "let's get this going right now."

In other words, I don't go to the Mos Eisley cantina because I want an offworld transport next Tuesday.
I go there because I want to get off this planet right now, and that's where the pilots are.

It seems to me that the idea of your recruitment bar is best served by having a mud where this
happens. This would keep things immediate and spontaneous.

There's nothing I can think of necessarily wrong with doing it forum style also, but if the idea is
spur of the moment "hey let's rp right now", I'd think an actual mud is a better place to kickstart.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net
25 Apr, 2009, Ssolvarain wrote in the 38th comment:
Votes: 0
Ok, you don't rp or like the idea. We get it :tongue:

I like the ideas found in the first post. How it would work might be a bit confusing, but I think it could be some good fun for roleplayers. Not really my thing, but it's a cool idea.
25 Apr, 2009, Cratylus wrote in the 39th comment:
Votes: 0
Ssolvarain said:
Ok, you don't rp or like the idea. We get it :tongue:


If that was directed at me, then I don't think you understood my last post.

-Crat
25 Apr, 2009, Jhypsy Shah wrote in the 40th comment:
Votes: 0
Cratylus said:
Jhypsy Shah said:
mystery of whatwassaid is solved 1000 xp to be split by all in the thread :D


Ok, if I got that right, then I have a suggestion.

I think the forum-based recruitment bar is a perfectly serviceable idea.

However it seems to me that a recruitment bar has an implication of "let's get this going right now."

In other words, I don't go to the Mos Eisley cantina because I want an offworld transport next Tuesday.
I go there because I want to get off this planet right now, and that's where the pilots are.

It seems to me that the idea of your recruitment bar is best served by having a mud where this
happens. This would keep things immediate and spontaneous.

There's nothing I can think of necessarily wrong with doing it forum style also, but if the idea is
spur of the moment "hey let's rp right now", I'd think an actual mud is a better place to kickstart.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net


I thought about doing something smaller like that with the Yet cartoon last year:

http://www.mudbytes.net/index.php?a=topi...

Now I'm working with another MUD team as well, doing an interactive comic that will highlight the MUD's world (a new storyline) and the player characters and the effect that they have on their own world. Which I thought would be neat because I could promote that and anything that anyone else was doing that was simular or just wanted to try something different.

Ironically, I started redoing the yet characters in flash..there's a few people interested in playing with .swf files for a flash game..but I'd just as soon help the game idea itself as a whole evolve first, maybe start a more universal-newbie-friendly-multi-game-group as a place for people with simular ideas. Then put any ideas of a Yet game that haven't already been done on hold..but still work on the cartoon.

I believe that the merc bar idea could really turn into a whole new level of fun.
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