I cannot think of someone I respect more than @faraday when it comes to designing MUs. Ares has consistently impressed me, and I think of her contributing more to the overall hobby in the past few years than anyone.
Faraday is so good and so accomplished at what she does that when people on Arx come to me for suggestions about getting games going, I usually point them to Ares, not our code base. I cannot overstate how good of a job she's done in making the hobby more accessible.
I can understand people being disappointed, but I'm honestly impressed they imposed a cutoff. Takes a lot of guts to do that, knowing the kind of griping it'll get. It is to their credit, and speaks to people being willing to make hard choices to keep the kind of game they want.
There's a lot of great collaborative roleplayers in the hobby. Probably more than anyone realizes. And every once in a while there's a scene where just everyone is on point, and it makes me remember why this format for roleplaying is my favorite.
@Caractus your app is like "maybe we should bring back kink shaming"
Yeah, I have aphantasia. It's interesting to me to look at the practical effects of it. Like when descing the grid for my game, almost all the room descs are extremely perfunctory descs of what the place looks like and then a long digression in lore, and it never occurred to me until recently that might be why.
Like there's an interesting conflict between people that are mindblind and others when I write a description and someone presses me for details. It feels exactly like someone telling a story, and then someone pushes them for completely extraneous things they never would have thought of. Like "what color is something" is a lot like a kid asking a parent telling a story and pressing them for details the parent hadn't thought of. "Exactly how old were the protagonist's parents, what was their birthday" -- details I'd never, ever think of because I just don't picture things so like "what color is it, how big is that, where exactly in the room is this located" never, ever occurs to me.
Funny enough, I always considered people going, "But what does this LOOK like" to be extremely anal and I just didn't care. ETA: In contrast, I actually really enjoy reading people's descs, but in RP I've been more drawn to people implying the mindset of a character, their motivations, emotional state, etc- it's much more immersive to me.
Way, way, way more people are okay with their characters dying in a cool way than they are ever okay with being made to look like an idiot, or just being wrong about something. It isn't even close. People will tolerate catastrophic losses no problem as long as it doesn't undermine how they picture their character, but if you basically ever suggest their character is less cool than they think it is, a lot of players will fight that to their dying breath, and would way rather be banned while throwing a meltdown of epic proportions than take that.
My personal take is that you should just build the environment around people that like story and get invested in it, and reward them for that behavior as much as you can, because they are the ones that generally make the environment really come to life and generate positive experiences for other people. Then you can try to create as much incentives as possible for buy in from people that aren't as invested in story, but mostly I'd be looking at how to stop them from damaging things for the much smaller first group.
Like I honestly think it's pretty simple, though simple doesn't mean easy. Just keep rewarding quiet, no drama players that gracefully deal with consequences and roll with stories. It's incredibly easy to fall into the trap of trying to appease people that are cool 95% of the time but freak out 5% of the time, particularly when they have tons of friends, but you really should just focus on the 100%'ers rather than tweak the game to accommodate 95%ers at their expense.
ETA: OOC environment is the #1 reason very chill, story focused players aren't on more games. If someone is just looking to collaborate and tell stories with other people and only invested in RP, what do you think they do when they log into the game and their first experience is seeing someone be a dipshit in an ooc room? They are gone immediately.
@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:
Can you be more specific? Why is it a horrible idea?
Why would you wish to reward someone being disruptive to the play environment with a public spectacle with which that they can further disrupt the play environment?
@downwithopp said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:
What happened with Snowglass was unacceptable. If I made her uncomfortable
In light of how the thread developed and the numerous posts, let me just highlight that from your original post and say the answer is probably, 'it is a safe bet you did'.
I'd take from this thread that if you have an inner voice going, 'Hey would this be uncomfortable' the answer is always yes, and do not do that thing.
Everyone has a lot going in their lives. Just some people want to make sure it's everyone else's problem too. Don't try to justify or explain, really. I feel for someone that has all sorts of terrible reasons they acted out but at the end of the day, there's plenty of people MUs dealing with horrible, horrible shit in their RL that never cause problems for anyone.
Ever.
@phase-face It might be helpful to think of what kind of role you see or other staffers filling, since that can kind of suggest the game you want. A head storyteller, where you are creating plot everyone can join in? An arbiter, where people are all making their own stories and you help curate them? And so on.
I think trying to think of how you want to spend your time running your game can help shape the game you want to create and how it plays.
RL is really, really tough for her right now. 2020 hit her over and over again in a dozen different ways. Talked just short of a month ago.
@TiredEwok said in Things Coded in Firan:
I thought there was something about having to go to the bathroom? Of course, I could be remembering incorrectly all together. It has been 17 years since I RPed there.
Probably thinking of bathing. There was code that described your character smelling as an added line on their desc based on how recently you bathed. This meant every character coming off the roster also stunk, iirc.
@SparklesTheClown said in Differences Between MUDs and Everything Else? (MUSHes, MUXes, etc):
@Apos said in Differences Between MUDs and Everything Else? (MUSHes, MUXes, etc):
b) Feeling that they are prevented by coded constraints from roleplaying about something they want to do. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be sanity checks and automatic thematic enforcement.
The idea of reward, immersion, and constraints is a pretty useful thing to think about. I absolutely despise eat/drink code and never thought they added to anything. But I think certain code that add to the narrative of the game is definitely useful. Sanity checks is definitely a good example. Having code that pushes narrative rather than hinders or limits people I think is the ideal nuance here.
One thing I can't overemphasize enough is how much variance there is here in what players find acceptable or not, it very much is a 'you cannot please everyone' thing. It can be really, really easy to kind of find yourself constantly chasing an implementation that pleases everyone when it doesn't really exist, so I'd focus on what you'd personally find the most fun in terms of sanity checks/thematic enforcement.
@SparklesTheClown said in Differences Between MUDs and Everything Else? (MUSHes, MUXes, etc):
Like, at what point in a game's design do you think an average MUSHer looks at a game and goes "that's too MUD for me"?
The places a MUSH player will opt are pretty simple but also very dependent on an individual.
a) Something coded in the game that they feel they have to deal with but do not enjoy. Ie, RPI having to eat/drink/sleep or required maintenance tasks.
b) Feeling that they are prevented by coded constraints from roleplaying about something they want to do. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be sanity checks and automatic thematic enforcement.
c) Feeling that code is removing their narrative autonomy over a character. In RPIS this is mostly automated actions.
I think the most effective trade offs are making interacting with the environment feel rewarding and responsive, and act as thematic reinforcement of what a character is really good at and what they are bad at in regards to the environment. But always making sure it stays true to the character and players aren't forced to handwave things away for narrative ease.
@Pyrephox said in Emotional bleed:
Part of my IC/OOC boundary routine is to try and make sure every character I play disagrees with me on at least one and often more than one fundamental value/motivation.
I really can't overstate this. I enjoy RP on a lot of characters I never have any significant attachment to, and I usually have aspects of them that I dislike, or think is profoundly wrong. I don't tend to play any character I'd fall in love with, if that makes sense. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't play characters they get excited about, or really like, but if something becomes an avatar for them in a profoundly intimate way, it can get really unhealthy really fast.
We're a hobby that feeds off the creative energy of everyone around us and waxes and wanes, and that's a fragile thing. A few lukewarm or bad attempts at trying to stir something up is enough to discourage an awful lot of people in the hobby, and that goes for a format with hundreds of thousands of roleplayers or ten.
Really all it comes down to is just a few things. Are people able to find roleplay they enjoy when they want it? Are they left alone while doing it? Are they able to draw on the creative energy of others and combine it with their own? Are they confident they'll be treated fairly? Are they confident that the stories they get invested in won't be ended capriciously before they are ready for them to end?
Some of these things benefit from a large playerbase, but a lot don't. Just energized and active other people.
@deathbird Tessa's still around on Arx on a couple of alts, that death was a non-con as I recall.
@Caractus your app is like "maybe we should bring back kink shaming"
