@Carex said in The Dark Side of online Role-Playing:

I'm not talking about your paranoid, nightmare scenario. I'm talking about what really happens on a real day-to-day basis where kids go online to things like Furry MUCKs and or Anime games and someone teaches them what the vagina is for.

I'm talking about the parents that try and stop that.

Parents should try and stop that!! A kid should not learn about sex and sexuality from some rando on the internet. That is NOT OK. That is setting themselves up for an abusive situation.

And if you are online and starting up a TS scene and all of a sudden you realize the person you're RPing with is so sexually immature they don't have the basic anatomy down, the correct thing to do is to stop. Advise them to talk about their issues with their parents or other trusted adult. Then let staff know there's a minor on the game.

Exploring sex is not wrong. But adults have a responsibility to all the young people around them to make sure that they are not exploring their sexuality in a way that is inherently dangerous.

@GangOfDolls
And this is my problem with this season. If you have to tell me in after-episode interviews what happened, then you did a crappy job writing.

@Macha said in To OOC Room or Not to OOC Room (and Other Artifacts):

Right now, I'm in a scene that just popped up from people talking in the OOC lounge. Because people all were like. "You wanna do something?" And there's at least 3 people in this scene that my characters haven't had a chance to meet before now, but now they will.

Wouldn't it have been preferable to have that conversation on a channel though? There could have been someone already on grid waiting for RP, who was excluded from this scene and conversation because they weren't in the OOC room.

This regal girl is CJ.! I picked her up a week and a half ago and she's kept me far busier than I predicted!

Talents include:

• Being calm in her crate
• Chewing on things
• Stealing treats
• 'Sit' and 'Down'

Still working on:

• Going down stairs
• Walking in a straight line
• Not getting tangled in her leash
• Remembering that not everyone loves the rain as much as she does.

Active:
Arx - Daturo

Past games (In which my memory is awful....):
Spirit Lake - Will
Fate's Harvest - Cerise
SFMux - Natalie
Harper's Tale - I think my character's name started with a K. Definitely a healer, though.
Various other Pern games....
Castle D'Image - I vaguely remember playing with a guy named Thanatos
Various other independent themed that I can't remember
Aether & Aether II - So can't remember who I played...
Firan - Dafne, Lilana, Pythia, Lilah (and others I can't remember)...
Dark Metal - Some mortal that I can't remember, hung out with Tommy and another werewolf
TR - Cerise. There was also a ghoul, who I'm pretty sure was named Risa.
RFK - Kara
RFK II - Mackenzie
BITN - Cerise
Arx - Lydia, Zara
Fate's Harvest: Maddie
F & L - Danielle
Descent - Sam
Various other WoD games...

I've been struggling recently with realizing that my ideal pacing is different than many people's pacing when it comes to MUs. Specifically, I've come up against issues, where players want to go from meeting my char to Sharing All the Things within a scene or two.

Personally, unless there's a reason to speed things up, I like a slow burn. I like slowly discovering and learning about a character with maybe one or two reveals a scene, and then I like time for my character to chew on that mentally and time for other chars to chew on what my char revealed before we come back again.
Same goes for a plot, I want a Thing to happen and then I want plenty of time for my character to RP about it and consider it and make the next move.

However, it seems lots of people want fast moving plots and lots of action. So I'm curious, what do you consider good pacing in MUs and storytelling?

@WTFE said in Eliminating social stats:

I really don't give a shit. All the "Federalist Papers of RPGs" in the world doesn't change what literally thousands of years of literature has deemed to be a narrative. There is merit as a game to the "let the dice lie where they may" stance. But that merit is not a merit for narrative. Good narratives can emerge from that only by accident in the same way that getting a coherent and decent character out of a character generation system that will kill characters off part-way through can: blind luck.

And note, again, I'm not saying you're wrong for liking the "gamist" approach (as much as I fucking hate that clunky neologism). I'm saying you're wrong for thinking that the "gamist" approach made for a good narrative here. You're not doing wrongfun. You're just factually incorrect about the narrative structure.

Several times in this thread, I've heard people equate using dice as the enemy of creating narrative. I want to push back on that. I'm quoting WTFE just because this is one place where I've read that argument, but certainly, he's not the only person whose made that argument.

Here's the core of my argument: MUers are terrible writers. I don't mean that they're incapable of stringing together 3-5 sentences with vivid language in engaging poses. They can absolutely do that, by and large. No, what I mean is that, for the most part, they don't think long term about themes and beats, and what constructs a good narrative. Ex: "I'm going to have my character lose this conflict so that he can wallow for a bit and then have an awesome comeback," or "The story I'm telling with this character is one of alienation and loss and so, I want to sabotage his own attempt to become Priscus though his inability to connect."

Muers don't think that way. In general, I believe that there are two major stumbling blocks to MUers telling compelling narratives. 1) They don't like losing, and any good story has peaks and valleys. MUers avoid valleys at all costs. 2) They don't control everything. Sure, you can be telling a story of alienation, but that doesn't mean all the other chars are going to play along (I've run into this with my char over at F&L, where I had to rejigger my approach to her several times).

In these circumstances, adding random events, and letting a neutral arbiter, such as dice, determine the outcome periodically, even for social interactions, can enhance narrative. They help a player adhere to their character's nature, strengths, and weaknesses, while simultaneously adding challenges and random difficulty for that player to overcome. The knee-jerk, 'well let's just throw away social dice because players don't like losing that way,' will not enhance the narratives told on that game, it will diminish them.

I want to add that I'm fine with people doing whatever if I choose not to do it, and that I don't view myself as one of those people out there to "win" the game.

I am worried about systems being sold as optional, but in the end become a necessity just to keep up with the game. "Keeping up with the game" being defined as finding meaningful RP and being able to interact with plot in some manner or another.

If the way that fashion is implemented allows me to ignore it completely, and doesn't result in me needing to go out and buy some prettyprettything to be included in PlotX, then I'm fine with it.

@WildBaboons said in L&L Options?:

I ran the Daes dae'mar (great game, political stuff) for a WoT game for a few years and mostly what I found was that people are just terrible at political maneuvering but think they're awesome. hamfisted maneuvers are thought to be great sweeps of intrigues and people get really upset when people point out that what they did was actually really dumb with negative consequences.

For me that I don't see the connection between L&L and high adventure. In my concept for L&L those tend to be opposite, unless you're looking for the idle rich who can use their copious downtime to adventure.

This is actually a peeve of mine on political games. You sometimes see where someone puts in a political action, and the ST goes, 'well, that's stupid politically' and the person gets dinged for it (or the converse, where the ST thinks it was a good move and it works out well for the person).

The thing is, we don't run combat by fiat. The ST doesn't get to say, "Yes, throwing a punch here is better than a kick, so you win," and I'm of the opinion that political RP should be the same way.

There should 1) be systems that players can manipulate and then 2) How well they manipulate it should come down to their sheet and their rolls and 3) When a player is way off base, but is playing a character that is supposed to be savvy, then the ST might want to step in and let them know that they're not going to succeed at Task A until they've done some more ground work to prep for it.

So, I think the appeal of the game was:
1 - Modern Setting, which makes it feel very different from Arx and there aren't that many other modern games out there. The ones that have launched in the past year tend to be focused on horror themes, which is very niche, and then narrow that niche even more, with the exception of Calavaras which seems (from an outsiders perspective) to have a very broad theme with a sandboxy feel.
2 - Fantasy elements, even if Magic isn't a big thing now, it will be.
3 - A clear narrative arc, which made it easy for players to imagine characters for this world. More games need narrative arcs!
4 - Non-fiddly game play/theme. Yes, Arx is the big player out there right now, and it has a ton of meat in the mechanics department for people to dig into, but I think a lot of people were waiting for something more streamlined. Similar to WoD: Tons of meat themewise on those bones, but do players really want to dig through hard to read books just so they don't look like a clueless idiot in game?

To sum up, Spirit Lake has broad appeal without seeming flat at a time when people are looking for games with broad appeal. It also launched at a time when there were few similar alternatives, and nothing clearly on the horizon.

@arkandel said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

@lisse24 said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

Just finished Rhythm of War and I really, really want a Cosmere game - despite the fact that I generally avoid games based on books, shows, or movies.

I would love that (but I have the same reaction to most of Sanderson's works).

An issue specific to this is how many things we still don't know about how the magic system works, what the next Words are, etc.

More generally though when a MU* is based on books (and especially an unfinished series) where the focus needs to be taken off of the canonical characters and shifted over to the PCs, funny things happen in the transition.

Yup, that pretty much lays out why I wouldn't make it, even as much as I'm hankering to play this game.

Just finished Rhythm of War and I really, really want a Cosmere game - despite the fact that I generally avoid games based on books, shows, or movies.

So, we know mega-multi-sphere WoD games tend to have players that are are overly aggressive and PITA's to play with.

We also know that Kingsmouth had a generally positive culture and got there using various larp-like systems, intensive staff-intervention, and restrictive character policies.

We don't know if the Kingsmouth model is the only way to achieve that end, because the vast majority of WoD games that start go the mega-multi-sphere PRP route and there's not a lot that have tried to add in some of Kingsmouth's systems or philosophies.

@faraday Notice I didn't specify open/private in the most recent post. I don't know if creating a live/asynchronous scene type is the answer or a third type of scene or keeping to the current public/private is the right way to go. If the hive mind says "A works best,". I'll defer.

Now, I won't go into all the reasons lest I derail the thread but if I had to take the current scene system and place variable timeouts in top of it, I would make the time out for open scenes really short and for private/closed scenes much, much, much longer.

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

@mietze Drawing a blank there too. If I write in a scene description and in a note at the top of a scene that this is a slow scene, expect so and so much time to pose, blah blah -- and people complain it's not fast enough, then frankly, no code is going to fix their refusal to read words.

This is why I keep coming back to wanting the ability to differentiate between timeouts for different scene types. If I set a really short timeout on one type of scene, it will naturally encourage more "live" play there, while I can be more relaxed on another scene type to accommodate people's desire for asynchronous play.

@Lotherio said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I get noting the pace, I always look for pace on a forum game (1 pose a week vs 2-3 poses a day or whatever), it helps me decide. Just an easy way to sort activity would be good without going complex.

Would something as simple as timestamps on poses when you open the scene be helpful then?

I'd argue against making anything too complicated, because there's a good chance when introducing anything new that people won't use it until it's been reinforced enough to be part of the culture.

It's also why my initial thought was just to build-in different timeouts to the already existing scenes (not that I'm sold on this being the best way). People already know to pick a scene type and this would nudge towards faster/slower engagement without the user having to worry about remembering one more thing.

I'm all about easing the burden on the average player as much as possible.

@faraday Not saying there can't be. I was more musing on the idea that it would be counter productive to have different types of scenes timing out on different paces.

I can see, for what I'm trying to do, wanting public and private scenes to have different activity requirements.

@krmbm said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

@Auspice Having a variable flag that allows scenes to stay open longer than an admin wants defeats the purpose, no?

If I want my game to favor live RP and not have aging scenes, I need to be able to make that decision as the admin. If you want a game that favors asynch RP and having aging scenes, you need to make that decision as a player.

That's kind of the root of my point: Ares isn't making these decisions; WE are.

I've given this some thought over the past couple of days and I feel like I want public scenes to time out rather quick. This is where people should be going for immediate RP right? But with private scenes, I'd be willing to tolerate a much longer time-out.

I love having outside presenters come in for PD webinars. When it's crappy and everyone is bored, it's so less stressful for me, then when I need to present the content myself.