Argh

[chipotle]

What's been sucking my brain out for the last two weeks or so is a MUCK project. God help me, I'm starting one, despite my recent assertions that I was leery about getting involved with PuzzleBox chiefly on an available-time basis. Oh, yeah, instead of joining a MUCK, start one! That'll take much less time, moron.

I didn't intend to. I intended to make a specific place on Tapestries -- a place for giants and "normals" to interact, akin to the Giants' Club on FurryMUCK. I came up with what I thought was an interesting concept, a little more rough-and-tumble as befits Taps, and a neat character and basic background.

Then several things happened. I learned that Tapestries has imposed a building moratorium, which started about the time that they surgically excised the Tavern. (This may be a coincidence.) I learned that several people had a "Tapestries, feh" reaction, which the surgical excision of the Tavern didn't help (which certainly is not a coincidence). A few people I talked with about the idea seemed interested. And the character I'd come up with was, well, very insistent about being developed.

So I've been on a spree of self-inflicted pain, getting Fuzzball 6 out of CVS and tracking down global programs (and hacking on a few of them) and brainstorming on a wiki. The wiki's primary purpose has been to keep me from working in a vacuum; I'm doing nearly all the installation and building work myself, but I wanted to have feedback. Rather than rallying builders and wizards to the server, I've been rallying brainstormers to the wiki.

I worry that this will be controversial, after a fashion, taken as a sign of arrogance or elitism. But I've watched many MUCKs start out immediately experiencing "paralysis by committee." Let's face it, in practice a roleplaying MUCK does not need a lot of rooms, given how many rooms on most systems are used for transit -- or just blithely ignored on MUCKs which have grown too huge. I'm hoping that by requiring true in-character roleplaying -- even just in social situations, not organized tinyplots -- the involvement will come from, well, roleplaying. The place is going to be made or broken on the strength of its theme and the style of roleplaying and plots that the setting encourages.

"Wait," somebody may say (just my inner voice, perhaps), "you're talking about not only furries but macrophiles here, aren't you? And you're expecting them to roleplay rather than just have strange VR sex?" Well, uh, yes. The MUCK is going to be adults-only, to be sure, and I'm not going to pretend there won't be strange VR sex there if it takes off! Nonetheless, I'm taking an uncalculated risk: that there's enough creative people within and around that community who'll be willing to try a strongly-themed roleplaying environment, one where they have to create an appropriate character with constraints imposed by that theme, to make such a place sustainable. We'll see. (I do mean "around that community," too -- the setting, I sincerely hope, will be interesting enough to draw in people who are interested in roleplaying and not adverse to RP around and with giants.)

More will appear here when appropriate -- which will probably be soon. The curious can, however, visit the BandariMUCK wiki at http://www.ranea.org/wiki for disorganized details.

Comments

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*wanders in via the usual sort of chain of links*

Around Puzzlebox, there's no explicitly OOC area. There's the 'OOC' command, which lets you say and pose with '[OOC]' prepended, as well as an OOC-page variant.

Serious OOCness is very rare; the general culture of the place has come to discourage it. If there's a flurry of twenty or so OOC poses in a row, you can bet someone will grumble and say 'can we get back IC?'. And people will. If folks want to discuss RL stuff, or contemplate plot ideas, they'll usually end up in an obscure corner of the geography, and politely warn anyone who wanders in that they're very OOC. Or page.

My attitude towards OOC gathering places is "if you want the West Corner of the Park, you know where to find it". When people need to go OOC, they can do it, but I feel like adding an explicitly OOC area to an IC muck is... slippery.

[mordrul.livejournal.com]

Ahh yes, thanks for reminding me. I totally forgot, in spite of playing just last night, that SCM also has 'os' and 'op' for OOC say and OOC pose. Also all pages and whispers have [OOC] appended to them. There's no IC whispering, oddly. I guess if you want to be naughty in a public room with someone, you gotta be OOC. *smirks*

I think you're right, though. Having an explicitly OOC area on an IC intended MUCK is a little cagey, but it does work on SCM. Again, though, I think that's primarily due to the geographic design of that MUCK in particular. I guess the 'goooc' zone serves as the obscure part of the geography, mostly because few people want to travel 10 minutes just to have an OOC conference with a few furs. And that's just space travel. You're also expected to be IC at all moments in time, which means looking to see if there's anyone live in each and every single room you travel in, and pose moving if there is. At least, that's the impression I get, since I've several times been page-bitched at for breezing through a room with someone in it when I was on my way to do something non-RP related (I either ignore them, or snap back, depending on my mood). Not to mention, it usually only takes 5 or so OOC comments by someone in a room to get the 'can we get back to IC' response. But of course, Bandari is not going to have these decidedly unique attributes and limitations, so you're right I think, that having a specific OOC zone may not work well.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

expected to be IC at all moments in time

Eeek. That sounds like it could be pretty wearying, especially if there's forced, programmed delays in space transit. Around Puzzlebox, I'll sometimes zip through a room if I'm going somewhere, though I'm just as likely to use 'meet' and pose something about exactly how I got there. (Does SCM deliberately lack rapid-transit tools like 'meet'?)

Stuff like that sounds like it could get in the way of story, which, I think, is a lot of what highly-IC mucking is all about. But yeah, that's kinda irrelevant to Bandari since 'travel time' will probably be two minutes or so at most.

I think there should always be some wiggle room for OOCness. And more importantly, a willingness to bend the rules a little for story. For instance, I could see someone getting uptight about a macro being 'in' a normal-sized house (I gather 'too big for the room' is a not uncommon argument in macro circles) when a few poses involving opening windows would suffice: the field of interaction is clearly Normal Person's living room, it just so happens that Macro is poking their head in from the yard. On the other hand, Macro being in a room in the underground catacombs that have no openings higher than eight feet (there's an idea for something to think about building, chipotle - some kind of area that macros explicitly just can't get to, IC) would be legitimate OOC concern.

I'm drifting from my point: I think I'm down on 'OOC Lounges' on RP-heavy mucks. It's too easy to just sit there all the time and bitch about your sucky life, the piss-poor quality of the dubbing on the latest Japanese import on Cartoon Network, or negotiate setting up a net game of $hot_computer_game_of_the_moment, with not even a thin veneer of your intended character. It's a mosaic story, not a virtual water-cooler with everyone in costume.

[mordrul.livejournal.com]

Does SCM deliberately lack rapid-transit tools like 'meet'?

Yup. You gotta get there physically. No allowances made for Q-hood. On the other hand, there's several different types of star drives. You have 'slow drives', which can travel from one corner of the galaxy (100x100 sectors in a square grid) in one single jump -- but it takes quite a while per sector. I don't yet know how long. They're nice and cheap. You have 'microwarp' drives, which take only 10 seconds per sector -- but can jump no further than 10 sectors per jump. Then you have normal warp, but I have no idea what the specs are on that. On the uber-elite (and uber-uber-UBER² expensive) end of the spectrum, you have spacefold drives. Pick a sector, and *BAMF* you're there. Still have to pilot into the system the slow way, though. There's one system I've seen which enforces a delay of something like 5 minutes or so just to fly in from the outer system to the inner. But only one, thankfully. The rest of them it's as quick and easy as moving from one room to the next on a normal MUCK. Did I mention they want to enforce RP? They do have a valid point in this. Say you're on a TP mission to smuggle contraband to a person on a spacestation. Say that you have to get from System A to System B to do so. And say that there's a Space Navy force with an Interdictor ship and some gunboats patrolling in between the two systems. Realistically speaking, you'd have to deal with them somehow. MSummon and other similar tools is kinda an unfair way around that -- in that particular context, of course.

As for sizes, I believe Chipotle is making character size a global stat, so that when you try to go through an exit, the game checks to see if you're within the room's size constraints. While you have a valid point about a giant poking their head in through the window, you're also assuming a window big enough to accomadate them easily without tearing the wall apart. It's a little messy, and I think the most expedient way of dealing with this is to simply have hard-coded size limits, which means the giant can't interact with the little inside the room, or not at all, wherein you can then pose that the giant is sticking in their head. Personally, I like the concept of having size limits hard-coded, but we'll have to wait and see what it's like in practice.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While character size is a global stat, right now there's not an easy way to make an exit lock based on that -- the server's lock system can only be keyed to see if a property is present or not, but can't test against the value of the property. I'll be working on it. :) I think for now, though, the idea that people can just roleplay that will work. I suspect when the place opens shortly there's going to be relatively few "interior" locations finished beyond Sharabu, anyway.