BBS As A Game Prop reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maladapted · 2015-11-12 18:53 I'm active in several online roleplaying games that adhere to the MUX/MOO family of games. As a part of a story I'm working on, I want some of the other players to have access to an old BBS system. They're all too young to have ever experienced one before, so it will be a real retro trip for them and something they can explore. I think they will take to it because they are already proficient with text based interfaces, telnet, etc. I'll need to create one so I can seed it with all the info and clues they will need to solve a mystery. If it was just exposing them to a system, I would use an existing one someone is hosting. So which system (Synchro, Mystic, et al.) is easiest to set up and start using? I can put some time into it, but I only have about a week to get it up and running. Any info is appreciated! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RealDeuce · 2015-11-12 19:46 If you just want telnet, and don't want/need to customize menus and such, I expect they're all about the same. The question really boils down to how you want to customize it to seed the clues... do you just need custom menu screens? Want read-only message bases? Emails? Do they need to sign in as a new user, or are all players going to be the same user... do you want them to go through the normal new-user step or something different? etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maladapted · 2015-11-13 00:14 Good questions. I envision them gaining access to the sysop account and going through the messages of a few users. There would be subs with conversations that would give hints as to what the password to the account would be, such as a back and forth on the best captain of the Enterprise, their favorite author, a band they're really in to. One of those would be the password for the sysop account, and then they can go through the messages to and from the person they are investigating to find the name of the person they were making a deal with. Then back to the subs to fish out information about that person. Maybe the user registration info, or maybe back to the subs for info that indicates where they live. A noodle shop at X and Y streets. The score of a big game they went to. Things like that. They would go through a new user setup, but I would have simulated a period of activity with multiple accounts. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- brainspider · 2015-11-13 00:30 Either Synchronet or Mystic should allow you to get a system up and running in a couple of hours with generic menus and screens. I use Mystic and only know that, but I would say it's doable in minutes. Pretty much works right out of the box. Maybe a while to create a login ANSI screen with something like PabloDraw, setting up the message boards, and you're done. Modding Mystic is dead easy and it's very mature (new stable release just came out a few days ago, and it sounds like we're not far off an alpha release of the next version soon). I don't know of a way to edit the timestamps of messages in Mystic tho, so if that's important, you would have to change the clock of the host system. Not sure if Synchronet makes that easier, others with experience with that can chime in. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RealDeuce · 2015-11-13 01:11 So, once someone has the sysop password, they're effectively "god" on the BBS computer. If you're interested in having a BBS setup that you can create a separate clone for each player, something small would be important (so Mystic could be a good choice). If you *don't* clone the BBS for each player, the first person to get the sysop password could go through and delete the messages with the hints thereby blocking anyone else from getting past the BBS stage. Further, almost every BBS I've ever used allows the sysop to drop to an OS command prompt and run arbitrary commands as the user the BBS runs as... an obvious security issue. It sounds like each player would need a new instance of a VM to run the BBS in... for that you may want to look at an older DOS BBSs and DOSBox with telnet support. You would want to make sure that the DOSBox user with command prompt access can't escape DOSBox too (pretty sure you can do that, but not positive... the biggest thing to worry about is the ability to mount drives outside of DOSBox). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- electronicchicken · 2015-11-13 06:13 Chances are that a lot of the 'sysop' access desired here could be simulated without handing over the real deal. I'm not sure about private mail/messages, but requiring a certain security level in order to see a given sub (or user list, or a fake 'user editor') might suffice. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maladapted · 2015-11-14 08:58 You make a good point about dropping into the OS, and that is something I'll have to watch. Running it as a VM won't be a problem. Perhaps they can gain access to a co-sysop/sub-sysop thing. I guess it depends on the granularity of the permissions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maladapted · 2015-11-14 08:58 I was thinking sub/co-sysop with lowered privileges after RealDeuce's post. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maladapted · 2015-11-14 09:00 Changing the clock is exactly what I intended to do, because I'll be running this inside of a virtual machine. I think I'll give them both a try this weekend, but I'm reassured to know that it might be very quick. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- mro_1337 · 2015-11-15 20:14 more like 10 mins max ---------------------------------------------------------------------- char2 · 2015-11-16 04:16 This is a really cool idea. Paging /u/m_bishop , who was trying to set up an ARG with a similar premise over at /r/coredump . If you just want to set up an easy custom telnet interface, permit me to plug my project [MudCore](https://github.com/endgame/mudcore). You'd have to build everything from the ground up, though. I suspect that you'll be better off fiddling with an existing BBS though, and I'll leave that to the other commenters. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- m_bishop · 2015-11-16 05:01 Yeah, I actually saw this post, but he seems like he's on the right track. I used a Wildcat server when I was a kid, but I don't know if that's any better than the other stuff suggested. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Maladapted · 2015-11-16 19:30 I'm looking through the /r/coredump and there are some really cool things there. Not quite the direction I was going in, but there are a lot of places they touch. It looks like a fun project! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- m_bishop · 2015-11-16 19:37 yeah, I've been having a lot of fun with it. I didn't suggest that you use my game engine because, frankly, setting up a BBS will be a lot faster, and likely serve your purposes a bit better. I remember helping people in my area, in highschool, set up Wildcat BBS's in a few hours. Those were back in the modem days, but I know there's a release that allowed connecting through TCP-IP, and I believe a single-user system is still free. I don't have any recent experience with running a BBS, though, so I wasn't going to pretend I had a lot to offer. Good luck! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _GiantCentipede_ · 2015-11-22 01:49 I've been thinking about this since I first read the idea. Here's what I'm thinking: If you created a "master" qcow image for QEMU, you could have a process that would clone the image via qemu-img. In that way, you would launch a single QEMU instance per player that would have the ability to gain full access in their own instance. You could potentially even generate unique sysop accounts each time you create a new cloned image. That would be more involved. Each players game could be stored as their userid and retrieved based on either a command line argument or via drop file. You'd likely need some startup scripts and batch scripts to get things running, but I have done similar things in the past for single player text games redirected to telnet. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2015-11-24 02:24 Also man you could just code an entire menu and sysop section and make the whole thing look like it's real but it's a programmed simulation. That would be the best way in my opinion because then you could have 100% control over the game. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2015-11-24 02:25 I now Javascript and other ways are fairly easy but I do all my coding in wccode for wildcat and it allows you to easily do what you want. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- HerpieMcDerpie · 2015-11-29 21:21 I'm proficient in MOO and would love to know where I can play this! MOOs are beyond fun but so dead.