Eclipse Phase MUSH

Hmm - lemme kick around some of these old code snippets and see what I can come up with.

The more clear an idea you get on exactly what command structure you want your players to have - the more likely I'll be able to point you to a code base that will serve you well with minimal work (or be able to sculpt one for you with some of the code I have hanging around from back in the day).

For example: There's a drupal RPG module I've been eyeing for a few months now, looking for a good excuse to update... It might actually work for your needs.

Requirements/Ideals
I am putting this down to work up a list of requirements for what a good EP Mush should look like. Please feel free to add/change these as this is just a start to try and work up a good outline.

I would start out such a Mush, with around 10 rooms, representing a single small habitat, as well as several OOC rooms.

Something along the lines of:

OOC Greeting Room
-First room Players encounter. Perhaps allows player to easily change from one character to another.
>Exits to: OOC Lounge, Character Generation Rooms

OOC Lounge
-Place to idle and talk, everything here is ooc.
>exits to: OOC Greeting Room, Generic RP Rooms

Character Generation Rooms
-A series of rooms which take the Player through the CG process.
>exits to: OOC Lounge

Generic RP Rooms
-A single Lounge area connected to several rooms used for IC plotting allowing the GM to change the rooms desc.
>Exits: OOC Lounge

IC Areas
-PCs teleport to IC areas with a 'goic' command or something similar. The command should return them to the last room they visited. The layout should be that of a small habitat at first.

Character Generation
>Should be as automated as possible keeping track of what players choose and how much more they can spend. Ideally all generation rules should be built in allowing players to create characters with as little set and approved by hand as possible.
>All characters should be made with a significant background. Enough background to show that the player has invested a good bit of thought into who the character is and has gotten some idea of their character rather than just put the points together.

OOC Chatting
>There needs to be at least two major chat channels which can be turned on and off by players, a public ooc channel and a new player channel. The former for basic table talk, the latter for help with rules and getting new players up to speed.

Rolling
>Ideally I'd like the Players to roll dice with the system. That is instead of typing in a command to attack something they instead type in a command to roll an attack and the game is resolved normally through human decision making rather than an automated attack system. The system should help keep track of stats and all the things that are normally assigned down to paper with a table-top RPG but allow the players to decide how things go. That said as much as possible should be automated up to the point of decision making in order to streamline things.

Player Tracking
>Ideally I'd like to see a system where a player can log into the system with one user name and access multiple characters from there rather than having to log in to each character separately. This would make it easier to track who is playing what PC and possibly allow for Players to have NPCs or Lesser PCs as well. Lesser PCs might be useful for shadow emulations, muses or other small AIs.
>Also I'd like to tie some of the in-game rewards to the player rather than the character. Especially rewards for GMing.

Character Tracking
>Needs to be able to keep track of all the basic information found on the character sheet, and ideally should be displayed in a similar manner or at least a manner reminiscent of the character sheet.
>Players should be able to bring up parts of their character sheets w/o having to call up the whole.

Rez Point Tracking/Awarding
>Admins should be able to award res points directly.
>Players should also be able to reward res points but through a system built to prevent abuse. DenverMush's +nom system is a good example.

GMing
>Any player can GM a plot. Plots that would cause changes to the mush in general would require staff approval. Players should consent to be part of a GM's plot but once that the GM should have final basic say, with some staff oversight in case of major abuses on the part of the GM. For the most part what a Player as a GM says goes.
>Logs of such plots would be submitted to staff for review and rewards given out based on that review/recommendation of GM.

I have to agree. There is no reason to add any overblown mechanics for space flight. Just use it as part of plotline when it comes up most of the actual role-playing and plotting will be done in the same few generic rooms, and that is fine.

Keep It Simple!

Most long distance travel in EP happens via farcaster which is instantaneous. At most you might want a travel queue to simulate the time between when something is sent to one part of the solar system and arrives to another and even that IMO is reaching too far.

Set the mush in a particular place. Good candidates would be Earth Orbit, Luna, Mars, Venus, the belt, Jupiter. Ideally I'd say set it near Earth as that seems to give a good range of inner and outer system travelers and there is some familiarity there.

Any travel time less than a day is trivial to gloss over. Put the setting in a place where travel times are relatively short. You want players to be able to play with their characters when ever they log on and not have to worry if their PCs are still moving from point a to b.

That said part of EP is its wide setting and even in the "neighborhood" around Earth/Luna travel times still do add up. Allowing for multiple characters from the word go might help solve this problem. One PC enroute you can play the other. The Alt policy would have to be much more in-depth than that of Denver mush, but I think it could be made to work(one reason why I am an advocate of setting up a Player account and linking character accounts off of that).

I'm kind of hoping in the midst of all this talk that you've gotten something, even if it's a few rooms and a morph put together and online. MUSHs at their birth are most vulnerable to the disease of perfectionism.

I'd even caution against waiting on character creation rooms to start. As in 'Don't.'

Start out with freeform or references to the (Creative Commons, available online) rules, but get some roleplay interaction going.

Lack of interaction kills. This is why you don't want perfection in starting. Actual play people can get involved in trumps prettified rooms and coded game functionality.

(Godded CaribMUSH back in its brief day.)

Ahhhh, just checked dates. Looks like this is already stillborn.

Outstanding! One thing I'd definitely encourage is, in addition to whatever standard IC area you have, you also make the game friendly to hosting people's online tabletop games. As small a playerbase as you're going to have with an EP MUSH, anything to get additional people there and online is a good thing, and some of them might very well make a character to play on the MUSH as well.

Ok, I cannot stress enough how completely stripped-down things currently are (since I just started the game a few days ago) but I thought I'd provide the EP community with the following:

Telnet (or point your preferred MUSH client) to:
atimeofeclipse.net port 9889

Currently, there are only a few rooms and a dice rolling command, but the rooms are capable of handling temporary dynamic descriptions (for whatever scenes you might want to run) and the roller will allow you to input a target number to compare against your roll.

For example: typing "+roll 46" (without quotes, for those of you unfamiliar with MUSHing) will roll a d100 and let you know the result alongside the target number (and if you have the ANSI flag set, the roll result will be either green if successful or red if a failure).

Anyway, if you want to come check it out, you're welcome to. I'll be working regularly on improving it from this point forward, but I wanted to note what the game can currently offer to those interested in MUSHing within the EP theme/system.

It's great to see this get started - as I mentioned in my earlier posts - just getting *something* up and working on improving it little bit by little bit - will get you so much farther than waiting for everything to be perfect before launching. You'll get a lot more commitment from people who help you build it.

Best of luck - I look forward to hearing updates as you work on it.

So the game is still up, although I've stalled out somewhat on the chargen automation (taking & passing those pesky qualifying exams for my PhD became a higher priority).

That said, we've got at least one group meeting regularly that uses the space as a virtual tabletop (it's the group Tyrnis is running, much of which has been discussed on the EP forums).

There's certainly plenty of room for more, and I'd definitely be interested in talking with people who might want to put together a cohesive focused theme for a static grid on the game to be used outside of or in-between VTT sessions - code knowledge is not a necessity, as I can take care of most stuff we might need.

Shoot me a PM or talk to me on the game (as Kale) - atimeofeclipse.net 9889

Thanks!