Lets make power emoting possible

[lordcooper]

To my mind:

l

A place:  This is a place full of stuff the author cannot be bothered coming up with. There is a thing here.
The (person) the author has no interest in describing is sat on a chair, looking away from you and towards the thing.

Roll str vs (person) agi.

You succeed.

Good = emote Kicks ~(person)'s chair out from under them.
Bad = emote kicks ~(person)'s chair out from under them, causing them to fall, slamming their face into ~thing.

If my char is strong enough to do this, before (person) has time to react physically, then fair enough, I can kick the chair out from under them (as in RL).  No stat roll would justify taking control of their subsequent actions.

[Drayab]

What if they are low agility but an amazing huge tub of lard? What if he's got a backpack full of rocks? Weight should affect the difficulty of the strength roll required to kick the chair out from under him. How do you decide how high to set the bar? When rolling versus his weight, what happens if you are trying to lift the chair he is sitting in instead of just kicking it out from under him? Intuitively, that is a more difficult roll, so how do you take that into account?

[MeTekillot]

Roll str vs <person> weight?
Roll str vs <person> weight, str?

[Drayab]

Okay, now make the difficulty adjustable. 

[RogueGunslinger]

And it's not just that it's hard to code.

Even if it were easy to code, it would provide an avenue for judging another character's skills/stats without actually engaging them in an IC exchange that necessarily would reflect the information you've gained OOCly.

Like the brawl code does?

[BlackMagic0]

And it's not just that it's hard to code.

Even if it were easy to code, it would provide an avenue for judging another character's skills/stats without actually engaging them in an IC exchange that necessarily would reflect the information you've gained OOCly.

Like the brawl code does?

I do not think brawl code really gives anything away that is not learned during the brawl.
If you beat the snot out of someone.. they are most likely weaker then you.

Honestly. I just think power emoting is a terrible idea. Do not want!

[Bogre]

I don't think its a good idea, either.

[Qzzrbl]

And it's not just that it's hard to code.

Even if it were easy to code, it would provide an avenue for judging another character's skills/stats without actually engaging them in an IC exchange that necessarily would reflect the information you've gained OOCly.

Like the brawl code does?

I do not think brawl code really gives anything away that is not learned during the brawl.
If you beat the snot out of someone.. they are most likely weaker then you.

Honestly. I just think power emoting is a terrible idea. Do not want!

The system I proposed isn't really any more power emoting than the brawl code is....

It just covers more bases.

[Drayab]

Honestly, I just wanna armwrestle somebody.

See, the nice thing about restricting what you're going to code to a specific situation is that it is decided before it ever comes up in the game what the important stats/skills will be. You can make arm wrestling depend on strength for raw power, agility for trying to surprise your opponent with a sudden surge, and endurance for those long, drawn out matches. Code it nicely, and you've got a fun game for people to play and bet on. All of the dice rolls are handled off stage, and there is no questions in the players' minds that everything is being handled fairly and, hopefully, realistically. Having to pause for OOC communication to discuss the proper dice rolls breaks the flow of the scene, to say the least.

[Qzzrbl]

roll amos emote suddenly lashes out at ~amos and slams a fist across ^amos jaw (emote suddenly lashes out at ~amos, ^me fist missing ^amos jaw by inches)

Check it out.

The original command, "roll".

It encompasses all stats, condensing them into a single variable, and perhaps a random variable as well.

Using "roll amos" targets Amos, rolling your condensed, summed up stats against his condensed, summed up stats.

The first emote, "suddenly lashes out at ~amos and slams a fist across ^amos jaw." is what would echo if there's a success.

The second emote, set within parentheses, "suddenly lashes out at ~amos, ^me fist missing ^amos jaw by inches" is what would echo if you fail your stat check.

There would be no "visible" ooc check that echoes, but one can use a command something like... "check roll" to check the last use of the "roll" command against his/her own character to make sure some asshole doesn't put a success emote echo in both parts of the command.

Example:

> Roll check

Last roll made against you: emote suddenly lashes out at ~amos and slams a fist across ^amos jaw (emote suddenly lashes out at ~amos, ^me fist missing ^amos jaw by inches)

And if a player catches abuse-- it can be reported to staff.

Thoughts?

::Edited to add::

Abuse of the feature (should anyone find a way to abuse it) will lead to the feature being unavailable to the offender.

Not to say my idea here is "OMG PERFECT!!"

You'll see there is very little OOC communication here, if any at all....

Get SoI out of your heads folks-- there are other ways to do it. :p

[Drayab]

I mean this in the nicest way possible, Qzzrbl, but a bad simulation is worse than none at all. Just taking an average of stats and throwing in a degree of randomness will allow ridiculous power emotes, like agile whelps beating mountains of blubbery fat and muscle at arm wrestling if the whelp is more agile than the tub of lard is strong.

[Qzzrbl]

I mean this in the nicest way possible, Qzzrbl, but a bad simulation is worse than none at all. Just taking an average of stats and throwing in a degree of randomness will allow ridiculous power emotes, like agile whelps beating mountains of blubbery fat and muscle at arm wrestling if the whelp is more agile than the tub of lard is strong.

I get what you mean-- which is why I'd like to get people to perhaps offer ideas to make the idea better, rather than, "No, that sucks I'd never ever want to see this ever."

Remember how many people hated the idea of a "Mud school" at the start?

I think that's what's going on here, mostly.

Just as people had a preconceived idea of what "mud school" is, people have a preconceived idea of what a system like this is.

[Drayab]

Well, first off, if you want to make this command as generic as an emote, you have to be able to tailor it to the specific situation. We want people to be good at some actions and bad at others, because that's how it is in real life. At a bare minimum, the command needs to:

1) Offer a selection of stats/skills that are important for the given situation. A non-exhaustive list would include things like strength, agility, height, weight, and all of the various skills.

2) You have to be able to pick any permutation of those skills to fit the situation.

3) You have to be able to balance their relative statistical weights to fit the situation.

So, an arm wrestling contest might look something like,

contest amos strength endurance agility weight 4 2 1 1

That's if you could get Amos to agree that strength, endurance, agility, and weight are the important factors in an arm wrestling contest, and that strength is twice as important as endurance, which is in turn twice as important as agility and weight.

With an intelligent GM, they would size up the situation and make a judgment call on the spot. The GM would weigh all the factors in a split second and come up with something like, "Okay, roll versus strength at a minus two penalty if you want to kick the chair out from under the fat slob on the slippery floor. Just be glad it's slippery or else it would be a lot harder." This is more difficult to handle in MUDs because the staff can't be watching all of us all of the time. I've never heard of this kind of on-the-spot arbitration happening in Arm, though I know some other MUDs do. Of course, it is a very common occurrence in table top playing, but that's because the format of the game favors it. To do this in a MUD, it's going to be left to the players to decide how to make the rolls fair, and I don't see how that can be done without some OOC communication. Even worse, the players that are trying to craft a fair roll will need to have some OOC knowledge of how to tweak it so that the roll fits our intuitive notions about the relative chances of success/failure for the situation.

That's why I say it is better to code specific situations instead of making a generic command. That plays to the strength of MUDs.