Player buy-in

[Arkandel]

I didn't want to derail a different thread with this and it's been a while since we had a good ol' fashioned general discussion about MUSH related elements so let's see...

I consider player buy-in for games to be extremely important. Lacking it can damage the culture early or even make certain 'different' game concepts impossible to pull off; examples include gritty post-apocalyptic MU* played like the Flintstones instead, paranoid political settings turning into combat or dating simulations, historical setups ignoring built-in faction tensions to the point characters just get along, and so on.

My two questions are:

1. Do you agree with that premise? Is buy-in that important or doesn't it matter as much, and why?

2. How do you get that buy-in from players to treat your game unlike others that may kind of look similar at a glance? What can you do to induce the kind of culture you want, from all kinds of perspectives; game mechanics, policies, roster or rank systems, etc.

Discuss.

[Coin]

@arkandel said in Player buy-in:

1. Do you agree with that premise?

Yes.

2. How do you get that buy-in from players to treat your game unlike others that may kind of look similar at a glance? What can you do to induce the kind of culture you want, from all kinds of perspectives; game mechanics, policies, roster or rank systems, etc.

In every way you can. But it usually fails.

[Kay]

As someone who has English as their second language, what does player buy-in mean, please?

[Arkandel]

@kay Basically let's say you want to run a MUSH where a secret government agency is slaughtering all Vampires, and with their depleted numbers the rest are trying to survive, forge alliances with Wolves, anything.

Instead your players don't seem to give a shit what you want. They date each other, treat this agency like just another monster, and basically ignore the nuances and details you thought would be cool to run an otherwise 'typical' Vamp sphere.

In that case they aren't buying in.

[Coin]

@kay said in Player buy-in:

As someone who has English as their second language, what does player buy-in mean, please?

Buy-In is how much effort you're willing to put into something. In this case, into a game's theme and respecting it, making characters that fit within it and function well to help it thrive, and how much your roleplay molds itself to that.

[Tehom]

I think it depends. If absolutely no one seems to be intrigued by something you thought was cool, then it might just be something that needs to be retooled. But evaluating that can be difficult - people might be more interested than they appear, especially if there's a few louder voices who kind of drown them out. A difficult thing, though, is to try to keep people who don't really care about a particular plot from ruining the fun of people who do want to buy-in to that without being draconian about it

On Arx, we tend to be pretty strict about enforcing theme because it's important both to staff and a lot of players. A player might not really buy into one of the themes, and that's totally okay, but what's not okay is them pretending it doesn't exist and wrecking things for people who enjoy it. Unfortunately, policing that sort of thing is very time-consuming and difficult: unless you have players willing to call stuff out themselves it's probably a losing battle.

[Thenomain]

@arkandel

See, here it makes it sound like you’re giving players a choice. “Here is a thing I want to do, cool?”

What you described was setting. This is what players should be agreeing to before they finish their first character. Their interpretation is going to change things, yes, but I cannot, e.g. go to Arx and decide my character is half-elven.

Nor can I go to an Elf-Only Inn RP channel as Spock. This is not a lack of “buy-in”, this is outright disrespect to the game. (Or hilarious.)

There are only a few things you can do, and most of them are corral the players until they agree to play the game before them. The other is throw them off or close the game.

You can also luck out and not have this be a game-closing problem. A solid player base will help you overcome many obstacles.

[Arkandel]

@thenomain said in Player buy-in:

Nor can I go to an Elf-Only Inn RP channel as Spock. This is not a lack of “buy-in”, this is outright disrespect to the game.

I think the typical case here isn't so visible and I don't think it's malicious; it might be as simple as people just trying to play what they know.

For example maybe I liked my party-going vampire from the last generic MUSH, and when you create your post-apocalyptic game... I create the same thing, with nearly no changes to his behavior. He still wants to meet chicks, arrange bar crawls and drink blud, which means I treat elements of your theme as obstacles and route around them. It's not malicious but... I recreate whatever doesn't already exist, including creating a bar, brewing my own beer, etc.

Here's the thing. A lot of this on paper can be as creative or even fun as anything else... or it might not be. I mean maybe I just buy Crafts 3 with a specialty, put in a +job ("Hey, I wanna run a bar, kk?") and otherwise I play my new Vampire exactly the same as my previous Vampire. Or maybe I do a whole storyline out of this and put some work into it.

Either way that may still not be the game you wanted to run, or the things you hoped your players want to be doing. Maybe you hoped they'd turn a suspicious eye on each other, wondering who'll steal their supplies, develop tightly knit groups stealing resources from other groups... and instead you have folks running a bar.

In that case they didn't do anything bad, it's not like they should be banned for it... but you failed to get them to buy into your vision. That's the kind of thing I'm referring to in this context.

You can also luck out and not have this be a game-closing problem. A solid player base will help you overcome many obstacles.

Yeah, all of these issues - I feel - can be resolved if you get lucky with your player base, especially at first. For example getting a couple of solid roleplayers people recognize placed into strategic positions (which isn't the same thing as ranks, mind you) to act as theme anchors might be good bait for others to follow their example and get a self-sustainable situation going.

[Ganymede]

@arkandel said in Player buy-in:

Either way that may still not be the game you wanted to run, or the things you hoped your players want to be doing. Maybe you hoped they'd turn a suspicious eye on each other, wondering who'll steal their supplies, develop tightly knit groups stealing resources from other groups... and instead you have folks running a bar.

I see this as malicious.

For me, malice is more than just ill-will, and includes a blatant disregard for others. In this case, you're describing a blatant disregard for the vision of staff and a clear description of the setting. Part of the concept of buy-in is accepting that vision and setting, and where elements are not so clear it is reasonable to expect someone to ask for clarification or permission to make an element their own.

[ThatGuyThere]

It is an old GM saying, No plot survives first contact with the players. This is true for MUs as well to a degree, the thing to do is get a bunch of players on board with the theme you are trying to run and the aspects of that theme that you are focusing on.
I think the most important thing is to be a specific as possible, Post-Apocalyptic can mean a lot of things. there are a ton of post apoc novels where the basic theme is people trying to recreate normal life as best as they can so Vampire that wants to recreate the life he enjoyed is not going against it being post apoc but is a different flavor for a post apoc story where the focus is on immediate survival.
Dies the Fire and Walking Dead are both stories about communities trying to survive in a post apoc world but they have a completely different feel as well as a different cause of the apocalypse.

As for how to get them to buy in I would say that is two fold part of it is to run and emphasize things that are in line with your vision so that being active means buying in and the second is be willing to compromise in small ways, if someone really wants to make a home brew set up or even easier a still to produce hard liquor let them but keep it limited and make it a thing, alcohol will be a valued commodity, word will get around and other survivors will want this instead of seeing it as conflict OOCly use it as the spur to why the raiders in the next plot are bothering with this settlement.
Some drift will happen anyway since most RP on MUSHes is social, so I would put the focus on guiding the drift rather than eliminating it.

[Ganymede]

@thatguythere said in Player buy-in:

I think the most important thing is to be a specific as possible, Post-Apocalyptic can mean a lot of things.

I agree. This is one of the best ways to get buy-in, and is why World of Darkness games of all stripes have an easy buy-in. Games with original settings have it a bit harder because they don't have tomes of fluff developed by committees to fall back on to answer the age-old questions, such as "can vampires have sex?" and other bullshit that players get caught up in.

[faraday]

@thatguythere said in Player buy-in:

Post-Apocalyptic can mean a lot of things.

I think this is a lot of the problem right here.

On a Western game, you can end up with people expecting everything from "Into the West" to "Little House on the Prairie" to "Pick a Spaghetti Western" to "Deadwood". These people will each have vastly different expectations on how the game "should" be.

They're all playing westerns, but they're essentially playing completely different games. How do you decide who's right and who's wrong? Or more aptly - who's contributing to the game and who's disrupting it? It's not always black and white.

I think most MUs default to "heroic soap opera" where the plots have holes like swiss cheese, the good guys save the day, and impossibly beautiful people hook up while doing it. If you're building anything else, you're pretty much going to have to be a tyrant about stamping out any RP that doesn't fit your vision. Otherwise people will do what they've been doing on game after game after game.

[Haven]

Pushing the theme is key.

Posts, wiki information, images, music, properly decked out NPCs, and annoyingly repetitious repetition of the repeating variety. Tell them over and over that the streets are dusty, the hookers all have facial herpes, and eating horses is cool. Or whatever. Tell them it is West World meets Deadwood with more murder and robots.

Some players read and absorb theme. Others are just there to app in 5 alts all for sexy time. It's a toss up.

[ThatGuyThere]

@faraday said in Player buy-in:

On a Western game, you can end up with people expecting everything from "Into the West" to "Little House on the Prairie" to "Pick a Spaghetti Western" to "Deadwood". These people will each have vastly different expectations on how the game "should" be.

Westerns are almost a perfect example of the issue, it has been a common genre for so long that just about any mood or tone can be found in it. So while my personal preferred take on westerns would be very classic John Wayne, (Big Jake was one of my favorite movies as a kid) but even if some one said John Wayne western there is a lot of ground there between She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or McClintock or The Shootist. All three are John Wayne movies but none would really mix well in theme or tone.

[faraday]

@thatguythere said in Player buy-in:

All three are John Wayne movies but none would really mix well in theme or tone.

Yeah. Staffers may have a very clear idea in their head of what they mean by "gritty post-apocalyptic" or "John Wayne Western", but ask six players what that means precisely and you'll probably get six different answers.

And it's not unique to westerns or post-apoc either. Pick any setting and you're likely to get different takes on it. With WoD you get different prefs about how 'dark' the world of darkness should be. Military themes have a tension between folks wanting a Hollywood military versus those wanting more realistic consequences when you do things like decking the XO. Even something as universally recognized as Star Wars can veer sharply in tone between A New Hope and Rogue One.

It's hard, and it borders on impossible when a LOT of players really don't care what kind of theme you're pushing, and view it merely as an obstacle to get around to do whatever THEY wanted to do.

[bored]

This is probably the thing that kills my MUing interest, these days. Basically any larger game either waters down their concepts to the point where buy-in is minimally required, or have big themes but no buy-in and fail to address it. Everything is sandboxy with the occasional side of 'Big Fuss metaplot' that usually railroads pretty predictably to success or failure.

It's kind of why I find HorrorMU interesting, since there's really nothing to it but buy-in. It's not easy to make work (structural problems are many) but really there's nothing there for you if you don't engage.

[Seraphim73]

@faraday said in Player buy-in:

Even something as universally recognized as Star Wars can veer sharply in tone between A New Hope and Rogue One.

Heck, it gets worse than that. You could have the difference between Solo/Rogue One and The Force Unleashed.

I think that buy-in is critical, especially on original-theme games, but also media-based games. I also think the most important things for attaining and maintaining buy-in for players are:

1. Being very clear and up-front about Staff's vision. I still like the idea of a mission statement on the front page of a wiki describing Staff's vision of the setting. Having some examples of feel ("the game is set in the Dark Times, but more of a Solo version than a 'The Force Unleashed,'" or "True Grit -- the new one -- not American Outlaws," or "The Walking Dead not Shaun of the Dead") can only help too.

2. Talking to players who haven't bought in. Depending on their reaction, this can either be a Come-to-Jesus shape-up or ship-out, or it can be a gentle nudge and a query about what would help make the setting clearer.