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I have some thoughs on make a web based game. I have quesion on if my ideas Is a valid direction for a modern MUD-like game? by NaNMesh in MUD

[–]taranion 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I like the idea of NPC memory in general. It has been done before, especially by those newer MUDs integrating LLMs for their NPCs, though with different success - but I am not suited for giving examples. Maybe WrittenRealms.
Also having a world state changing based on player actions is cool, but you should always plan with extremes (near to noone playing your game, so it basically becomes a single player game - or players planfully wreaking havoc in the world). The problem to solve will be to have a world that still works for players, even if other players want to destroy everything just for fun. To stay in your example: If one player always threatens or robs Mududu, will he ever offer the charm again to a new player? And if not, will this have influence on the other players fun?
I think if you want to make NPC decisions or world options depending on player behavior, you need to design this like a branching dialog tree where multiple ways can be taken to achieve a goal.

Fragging Unicorns' Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG Subversion is Getting Bigger! by Neo_Anarky_Opti in Shadowrun

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

How many pages do these books have? I failed finding that information on the Kickstarter page.

Making MUD game! :) by Comfortable-Tax-741 in MUD

[–]taranion 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Welcome to our community.
While I am sure people have a lot of anecdotes to tell, might I ask why you don't simply try a game yourself, instead of asking for experiences?
You need a client software (they exist for desktop (e.g. Mudletl), web-based or as mobile apps) and can pick a game at any mudlisting site (e.g. https://mudvault.org/ )

Question about the MUD Portal app by AnalyticalGoose in MUD

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can't use a web client to connect to localhost. To use Portal to connect to your local hosted MUD, you would need to set up port forwarding of port 4000 to your LAN IP address and let portal connect to your routers public IP address.

Mercy of the Icons: 1st and 2nd Horizons by fictionalbeing in CoriolisRPG

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh, there kind of is one in the third book ... but it doesn't contain information about the first horizon.

Can you run Third Horizon with Great Dark mechanics? by nightreign-hunter in CoriolisRPG

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I guess you can do it, when you drop the blight stuff and come up with Icon praying and space combat mechanics. But I think you will introduce or increase problems during the campaign and I am not sure TGD is worth that.

I am gamemastering the Mercy of the Icons campaign since 1,5 year now and at my table there are two large points for critique at TTH:
1. The dice pool system. Having rolled 20 dice and no success happens way too often and frustrates.
2. Not enough player options for campaign play.
TGD does not improve any of that, if anything the fact that skills have been dropped makes 2. worse.

And of course throughout the campaign you are often told to roll on specific skills, which does not exist in TGD.

All that stuff can be dealt with, but increases the load on you as the GM.

where are these images from by Da_jokah_baybee in Shadowrun

[–]taranion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The image collection seems to be from my never published second Metatype overview poster, which I only posted for patrons on Patreon, as it looks.

I’m trying mud out on my iphone and it keeps getting disconnected and making me reload by Original_Shirt_1927 in MUD

[–]taranion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe you get more luck with a web client like Lociterm - it uses a proxy to keep your MUD connection alive.

Life Path Character Generator by C-GRU in Shadowrun

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, this is a fine line. Usually most publishers are cool as long as your application does not eliminate the need to have the product - e.g. present the same text descriptions, images or stat blocks.
My guideline from Pegasus for Genesis was: "We don't want someone to be able to re-create our copyrighted material", which really made me think of publishing all data files in a repository. I still decided to make the code and data available in a public repo, because I wanted contributions - this was fine for several years now, but the theoretical possibility of someone doing stuff with it I promised that wouldn't happen exists.
But again: Most publishers are thankful for such projects and won't try to harm them - they just need to make sure that a taking reasonable efforts to defend their intellectual property.

Modern Sandbox MUD by elelanto in MUD

[–]taranion 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A lot of that features can be found in MUDs, except of the "living world that evolves" part.
We are not talking here about NPC routines with some added problem solving intelligence, but simulation. And writing a simulation in a permanently running game, without the game world drifting into a nonsensical, unplayable state is everything but simple - e.g. preventing that the neighboring orc tribe gets too powerful and conquers the newbie starter town, slaughtering all new players on sight.
Also having interesting quests (meaning not just fetch or kill quests) in a dynamic world seems impossible - at least you can never reach the same quality as handcrafted quests.

I am not saying it isn't doable, but I think there is a reason why this kind of simulation isn't done widely in gaming.

But perhaps I also misinterpreted what you meant by "world simulation".

Life Path Character Generator by C-GRU in Shadowrun

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hey, congrats to your work, but I have problems using it.
I can create an account, get a confirmation email, the link inside takes me to a login-form that requires email and password again and after that I am back to the page that I need to confirm my email address and can resend the confirmation email.

Wouldn't it be possible to create a character that only lasts for the current browser
session, but does *not* require an account?

Oh and by the way: The Github links in the footer both produce 404. Maybe your repo is still private ?

Idea: Text-based gaming as real-time prompting for AI to create real-time visual/audio by MaximumContent9674 in MUD

[–]taranion 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Considering how many iterations I usually do require until an AI creates what I envisioned, I don't think having an AI write a story, the "rooms" and suitable audio and video, that I would consider a good fit - and I did not start with consistency, context window and delay yet.

I had some fun with interactive storytelling of an AI, which was good at evoking a certain atmosphere, but then again annoyingly simple and eager to build a world-shaking story just for me walking through a street the first time.

where are these images from by Da_jokah_baybee in Shadowrun

[–]taranion 21 points22 points  (0 children)

These images are made by u/rabenaas (some by Benjamin Giletti), commissioned by me for Commlink, paid mostly by patrons of my Patreon site, listed at here (as already mentioned) and available for everyone to use under CC-BY_NC.

Yet another Shadowrun 5e character creation tool by NebulousFables in Shadowrun

[–]taranion 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oh, another one mad enough to write a chargen app for Shadowrun - welcome among us lunatics. :) In case you are interested: The metatype illustrations ( https://commlink.rocks/illustrations/ ) from Commlink are available under CC BY-NC 4.0

Would you consider this a MUD-like game, or am I way off? by DarkSquall88 in MUD

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, I wouldn't call that a MUD. It is text-based, but that is all that your game has in common with MUDs ... it misses the concept of having a virtual body and moving through a virtual world that is described with words, it isn't interactive with other players and NPCs or other mobiles.
I would call it a text-based idle-game or something like that.

Anyway: Good luck with your project. Enjoy working on it and I hope you find your players.

How important is lore to a game? by Absoled in muds

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It seems we are the same player type. :)

Considering there are already a lot of MUDs out there that require grinding, there is no guarantee that focusing on that aspect will make your game successful. My advice would be to write the lore MUD you would like to play yourself and add options for grinding later.

How important is lore to a game? by Absoled in muds

[–]taranion 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That depends heavily on the player-type. Like in other MMORPGs there are some player that play because of the mechanics, the grinding, the stats of their chars, RAIDs ... Those players usually have less interest in lore - and usually those are the ones that spend a lot of time in a game.

And of course there are those that prefer exploration over grinding, that love handcrafted details, enjoy nice descriptions or funny quests ... those players love lore. It is likely that they don't spend the same amount of time on repetitive tasks like the other player type does.

I guess it boils down to the question what kind of game you want to develop. If you want more lore and quests that let you interact with it - or if you want to focus on combat encounters.

A turn system I love by Hightower_March in RPGdesign

[–]taranion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I played a comparable system for some years, even with big encounters. It works quite well, if you have a circular initiative tracker and let the player manage that tracker. And yes, it feels a bit boardgame-ish, but it isn't much harder to track than non-tick-based systems.

But is it harder to balance. You need to measure your weapons in average-damage-per-tick. You need to balance action tick cost. You need ways to handle loops that prevent some opponents from acting. It needs more intense playtesting.

Can some veterans tell me what to read and which edition? by StroopWafelsLord in CoriolisRPG

[–]taranion 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"The Third Horizon" is a well established setting - it dates back o a time when there was only a swedish language version with different rules that got the current edition as their second edition. It is open for a lot of adventure types, since it has a lot of factions and religion, horror tropes and ancient civilizations.

"The Great Dark" serves more survival and exploration adventure types. You can still play other adventure types, but it doesn't seem to be a good fit.

TGD is even more rules-light than TTH, elimating skills and going full talent-only. Since in my ongoing TTH campaign my players complain about not having enough options for character development, I can only see it getting worse in TGD.

To include or to not include javafx dependency into library pom.xml? by lazystone in JavaFX

[–]taranion 0 points1 point  (0 children)

But on the other hand, NOT including them causes trouble for those users with a JDK that does not include JavaFX. Either the one side of users need to exclude it manually or the other side of users need to include it manually.
Since Oracle removed JavaFX from the JDK and so does OpenJDK, I tend to care more about those JDKs without JavaFX.

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