@testament said in Blood of Dragons:

I admit I'm slightly surprised that people are still playing it, given what's already been said, at length, about it.

Strange, isn't it? Or could it be that some things that have been said simply aren't true? And that other things that have been said are things that some players actually like about the game?

It is not for everyone. If you want to be able to destroy or create new Houses, assassinate the king or otherwise change the course of history, it is not the game for you. If you think that everyone should be able to play an unusual concept (female warrior, skinchanger, a character from outside Westeros, etc) to the point where you are likely to encounter one in every scene, then this is also not the game for you. If you want to start playing right away without going through an approval process, then it is only a game for you if you're willing to play a pregen.

But we have been told on many occasions by players that they appreciate that we are strict when it comes to keeping the setting canon and believable and strict when it comes to character approvals.

Though, yes, as @RizBunz said, +jobs sometimes take too long. We always try to give first priority to approvals, but since it is just myself and Balerion doing those, if we're away or busier than usual IRL, lapses happen.

@misadventure said in Blood of Dragons:

It does bring up the interesting topic of player agency versus anything that seems to be in the way of successfully expressing that agency, eg

• knowledge of the larger picture (staff knows more than players)
• inflexibility in story (staff can't or won't try to arbitrate results outside a slim range)
• obscured or unstated means (staff know how to do things and how much you need, players don't)
• a desire for a clear outcome (player actions, like RL, will often produce muddled results)
• it is unclear what are acceptable outcomes and tradeoffs for players (would you be willing to have your House destroyed because you didn't commit enough to a goal, or were outmaneuvered, or would you always suspect railroading, favoritism, or players with more time than you, more friends etc)

Those are some very good points and some of them are tricky to work with. I can readily admit that we have had issues with making it clear to players what they can achieve -- those players who are happy to ask a lot of questions often get a lot of things done, those who are less forward find it harder. The most successful players (in terms of getting plots approved and achieving things for their characters) are those who look at the road map we have (aka the known history for the period) and see how they can work within it.

@kanye-qwest said in Blood of Dragons:

But why can't there be female fighters? Game of Thrones has tons of females who fight.

To start with, we are strictly based on the books, disregarding the TV show entirely. In the books, they are much rarer within the Seven Kingdoms (which excludes wildlings and female fighters from Essos). Brienne, a few Mormont women and Obara Sand (and we do make some more allowance for women having weapon skills in Dorne).

@sunnyj said in Blood of Dragons:

@kanye-qwest I think she referred to limiting these concepts as opposed to outright prohibiting them. Fact is that in ASOIAF there are not many female warriors, and they are almost exclusively from exotic or bizarre cultures. If I make a Mormont woman, I would be kinda pissed if I was told I can't be a fighter, but a Lannister woman that fights is very bizarre. Limiting these concepts isn't bad, in theory, but... "in theory" is a one hell of an asterisk.

Yes, the concepts are highly limited but not outright forbidden. A Mormont woman who is a fighter could be possible, but since the game takes place exclusively in King's Landing and Sunspear, the trick there is justifying why she is hanging around at court in King's Landing.

Now, how do they decide who can or cannot make an exotic concept like Oberyn, for example, or Brienne, that has me curious!

Essentially, we use character levels. Available characters are either Open, Restricted or Limited (there are additional types as well, but they cannot be applied for, like Features or Closed characters -- the latter are dead, stuck on the Wall or otherwise unplayable) and while anyone can get an Open character, we start asking for a bit more with Restricted and Limited. A certain amount of experience with MU*ing and with the setting, for example, and logs as well. For Limiteds, you need to play on the game for a while as well, as those roles are too major/too unusual to have anyone jump into straight away.

A full-on female fighter, for example, would be a Limited concept. A female character in Dorne who has skill in archery and/or with knives could be an Open character.

@hamstersonpcp said in Blood of Dragons:

There's no accusation. Just what I consider an apt metaphor illustrating the problems with that approach in a MU* environment. The characters GRRM focuses on to tell his stories are, almost universally unusual, outliers, exceptional. The tone isn't even that different from numerous graphic novels. I'm struggling to think of even one 'average dude' in the SoIaF saga who's a main focus, or many PoV chars who aren't wargs, the cleverest, amongst the most dangerous, or tiny girl assassin badasses. Every time this comes up people fire back with 'While you wouldn't want an army of X or Y would you?!?' as if it's a logical counterpoint to take 'every noteworthy char is frankly exceptional, and most players (not all) want to be exceptional' and assume everyone would app that identical exceptional trait. If that's lazy, it's not meant to be. It IS, however, geared towards 'simple and equated to an experience in the hobby prolific enough to be almost universally understood'.

There are quite a few fairly average PoVs in ASoIaF that just happen to end up in extraordinary circumstances -- for example, Catelyn, Davos, Sam, Arianne (a princess, but otherwise not exceptional in any way) and Theon. And what is so special about Ned other than his position in society?

But yes, there are of course many exceptional characters too, and it is tough to balance it in the right way on a game. I do think it ruins immersion and believability if there's a number of "Briennes" running around, for example, and that's why we made the choice to have quotas on Restricted and Limited concepts. That said, we also say that the basic philosophy is that a player character is by default at a minimum above average in terms of their abilities.

@Derp Whatever.

@kanye-qwest said in Blood of Dragons:

But it does seem like, as has been hashed so many times, if there's an arbitrary restriction on # of badass outliers, no one is going to be truly happy with how those are distributed.

This is absolutely true, it is an issue for some (maybe many) players. In our case, we just felt it was a preferable problem to what happens without those restrictions.

@faraday said in MUers in the news?:
It would make no difference to the story if the kingdom of Rohan were patterned more after the steppe peoples of Asia, for instance, or if some of the dwarves in the Hobbit movies had different skin tones.

It makes a significant difference to the world-building. And that matters a lot for believable, immersive fantasy.

If an 11-year-old can see that the impact on actual modern-day humans matters more than the beloved lore of a white guy from the 1930's, I think more adults could stand to come to that realization.

I love the dismissiveness inherent in "a white guy from the 1930's".

There are plenty of things out there for all the actual modern-day humans to enjoy already. Not everything has to be updated to conform to the current fashion of how things should be done.

In fact, I would argue don't film Tolkien or Martin if their stories aren't diverse enough. Just pick something else.

But anyway, not getting into this tedious discussion again. I am not changing my mind, which is don't screw with the canon for any reason. And that's how I will always run a book-based game. Still, the point that I initially posted to refute stands: we do not disallow non-white characters.

@faraday said in MUers in the news?:

In a modern/real-world context I can understand that. But we're talking about fantasy settings here. The only "roots" are what you define within the context of the fantasy world.

If you're using an existing setting, the roots are defined already. I dislike tearing them up. Others obviously don't care, and are happy to ignore the text and add whatever the players want. For me, that defeats the point of using an existing setting.

But for a writer, sure, in some cases it works to define your Fantasyland as diverse. And in some cases, it doesn't. Why shouldn't someone be allowed to write a story set in an isolationist, monoethnic culture? Whether that culture is white, Asian, black or whatever (though I dislike using RL ethnicity labels for secondary worlds).

@Ganymede said in MUers in the news?:

Or you could offer explanations for potential players that make sense for your world. The choice is yours, but you could help applicants instead of asking them to be mind-readers.

I haven't said that we don't? If someone wants an unusual concept, we work with them. But yes, we do ask that they know the material and have MUSHed before in those instances, because it is harder to play as an outsider.

@reimesu said in MUers in the news?:

GRRM got his start in fantasy during a time period where people weren't taught how many ethnicities were roaming around Europe. The place was never as white as people were taught it was. Thus, the sheer whiteness of fantasy. Do I think he's racist? No, I think he never thought about it.

What he did was make a Europe where there was never any import of slaves and where there was no Roman empire that expanded beyond the borders of Westeros to bring immigration from other areas. What else contributed significantly to other ethnicities in Europe? Especially when one considers that Essos considers Westeros a backwards place.

Out and out saying that people of color will not be included because the game runner doesn't want to is fucking racist. It's 2022 and there's no goddamned excuse for it.

And we haven't said that. We've said you'd need to find a way of fitting in a character from outside of Westeros.

@Bellecourt said in MUers in the news?:

That's an interesting take, @Ganymede although in that case it should probably at least be taken into account in all that outrage on the authors behalf that he was considering making Valyrians (both Targaryens and Velayrons) black at one point:

What GRRM said was this:

https://grrm.livejournal.com/326474.html?thread=17888842#t17888842

"But in recent years, it has occured to me from time to time that it might have made for an interesting twist if instead I had made the dragonlords of Valyria... and therefore the Targaryens... black. Maybe I could have kept the silver hair too, though... no, that comes too close to 'dark elf' territory, but still... if I'd had dark-skinned dragonlords invade and conquer and dominate a largely white Westeros... though that choice would have brought its own perils. The Targaryens have not all been heroic, after all... some of them have been monsters, madmen, so...

Well, it's all moot. The idea came to me about twenty years too late."

As he says, its a moot point. Yes, now the showrunner for HotD decided to take inspiration from that statement and make specifically the Velaryons black, but as Condal himself has noted in interviews, it is a change for the show. Aka, it is show canon.

So sure, someone could start a show canon MU* with black Velaryons and they'd be correct. But we're book canon and we've had Velaryons on the game since 2006.

@Derp Whatever.

@Derp What licensed material?

@Derp said in MUers in the news?:

@Nymeria said in MUers in the news?:

We have no "only white characters" rule. However, the character database is 99% Westerosi nobles because we wanted to focus on court roleplay. In book canon, that limits the ethnicities available.

@Nymeria

That sounds an awful lot like a thin veil over a 'all important characters must be white' rule. Phrased another way, "you can play a non-white character if you want but if you want to be part of this game's action then you need to make a white character." We've already seen depictions of brown and otherwise indigenous-looking characters in the books, so we know they exist.

If you mean depictions on the show, that would be irrelevant. We're very strictly book canon.

Our "discrimination" is against non-nobles. Noble houses in Westeros are of Andal or First Man descent, except in Dorne where you have the influx of Rhoynar blood. GRRM's vision of the Dornish (noted on his blog) was European Mediterranean, but I've always said they could look anything from Spanish to Middle Eastern and that is how our players have described their characters. We even had a part Summer Islander bastard daughter of a Dornish family on the game for a while, whom I played for some plots.

@il-volpe said in MUers in the news?:
only white characters are allowed on her game.

I am not going to get into the rest because I've already responded on numerous occasions.

But, that claim is false. We have no "only white characters" rule. However, the character database is 99% Westerosi nobles because we wanted to focus on court roleplay. In book canon, that limits the ethnicities available.

Someone with good knowledge of the setting and prior MU* experience could play a Summer Islander, though its not easy to explain what they would be doing at court in King's Landing unless you want to copy Jalabhar Xho's story. We avoided adding any into the family trees because when we created them (prior to 2006), virtually nothing was known about the Summer Isles and we preferred not making stuff up.

Thanks to @grapenut we have now added the option to use a more advanced webclient to access Blood of Dragons. You can find it at http://www.westeros.org/BoD/Portal/. It is still in fairly early development but we think it is looking like a really interesting option for PennMUSHes going forward.