@sockmonkey today was my friday!

@thatguythere said in What Is Missing For You?:

My question on the cyclical WoD game idea would be how to draw players, if I can make a character on cyclical game that has a max lifespan of one year, or make a character on standard game that I can play for 6 years (not an exaggeration I have hit the six year mark with a few characters over my time in this hobby) there would have to be a lot more bells and whistles to draw me to the limited lifespan one.

I agree with this sentiment. My bells and whistles would be dedicated staff STs amd focuses on smaller arcs interlinking into a larger story woven by the backstories of the players.

@auspice Hi, sorry for the late replies. I just tried logging out and back in, but it made no difference, for what that is worth.

@kestrel said in Heroic Sacrifice:

So the question becomes, as a game creator, how do you tackle this? How do you encourage your playerbase to step back a little from their need to play heroes? From their need to avoid obstacles, reject risks/stakes, and inhibit progression or complexity in a story?

I don't think that this can be done on any MU.

For the most part, MU culture doesn't flock to mushing because they want a lot of complication that they won't be able to control. They're looking for complication and conflict that is titillating, but not frustrating. You're talking about a lot of people who are going online to write and roleplay fantasies with a strong emphasis of escaping the elements of their daily lives where they cannot control the outcome.

I've mushed for over a decade, and if you look close enough you'll see this forum (and I've seen its predecessors) touch point on this every few months or so. This will never, ever, ever, ever be resolved due to the general pulse of the MU community.

In short: For a number of people, this is gaming. For a larger number of people, this is writing.

I personally advise you find, keep track of, and do your best to maintain positive relationships with people with similar mindsets, but understand that you're going to be surrounded by players with this hero concept that you described. You'll often hear it as the "My Story" concept, where when they make a character, their concern is for my story, and they want to ensure that my story is fulfilling for them. The general idea is that whether they're reasonable about it or selfish, it's that losing (pc death, failure, etc) isn't fun, and that others should be willing to find ways to also accommodate resolutions to the story that are fun for everyone (in the way that some people argue on behalf of everyone when it really is arguing for their own characters).

So in the least negative way possible, I'm advising you to just let it go.

Now, from a GM perspective? If you want to show people that their OOC desires aren't going to run the show, the best way to do so is by mandating dice rolling. Dice rolls ensure that it isn't the will of the OOC personality that mandates pass/fail. Without dice, many mushers have learned that OOC tactics work best for cutting the red tape: Making friends, roleplaying within cliques, character assassination, being difficult until they're given what they want, manipulation, schmoozing with staff, etc.

Not intentionally being negative, but as a musher what you're asking will be something you will struggle with for your entire time mushing.

Before you is a woman effuse with a youthful vigor of the refined sort, delicate of mannerism yet delightfully unambiguous in her conversational tones. While her height may be short, curtailed by genetics and gravity, her build is is rather robust, perhaps even stout.

As she lingers before you her body always finds the most classical of poses, one hand cocked on her hip and the other with elbow bent, palm raised to the side. Should she be riled, however, you may hear her shout "Tip me over and pour me out!" in steamy, whistling rage.

Lest one get the wrong impression, she is also of the clever sort, the sort to show you what she can do! That handled pose is easily switched, inverted, that the entire process may begin again!

@misadventure It is amazing how many people don't understand that. We need the failures in order to make the successes have meaning. If all we do is win all the time it is just /boring/ because there is no variety. Yet so many people cannot abide failing at anything...

It is strange.

@rinel said in Real life versus online behaviors:

@kestrel I don't know how much I agree with that. What we choose to do with how we feel--the public restraint we choose to exercise--is part of who we are.

Fair point.

And it's not just a lack of consequences that influences our actions online; empathy is much harder to come by when you can't see or hear a person. And that's not an intentional issue--just think how many fights start on this forum because people misunderstood something written they'd never have misunderstood in a face-to-face environment.

It doesn't excuse consciously acting like a jerk, but I think it explains why people sometimes do. It's not that they don't care that people are upset; it's that they don't see it.

I think that empathy can be measured in the radius of a sphere.

Everyone cares about themselves. Almost everyone also cares about their inner circle: family, friends, significant others.

A little further out people care about people like them: their gender, their race, their political party, their country. Much further out people might/sometimes care about the wellbeing of their entire species, e.g. people from other countries, other backgrounds, other beliefs, social outcasts such as prison inmates, and so on.

Even further out people might care about sentient beings who are very different from them, starting with the family dog and expanding outwards towards endangered species on the other side of the planet.

Caring or not caring about people on the internet, who are theoretically on the other side of the world, and whom you can't see, would rank a little higher on the empathy scale, but I don't think that's any less a measure of the person in question. It might just be that they never even think about what the person on the other side of the screen is going through, but again, that's a lack of empathy.

It's similar to how some people are deeply moved by the horrors they see on the news, and become inspired to action, while some people shrug and move on with their day — or will even continue actively contributing to these horrors somehow — but would perhaps feel differently if they were transported into the communities and came face to face with the victims, whom they don't otherwise think about harming with their day-to-day choices.

I don't necessarily think that the latter category are 'bad people', but they're definitely less empathetic compared to the former. It isn't a binary measure.

@thatguythere LOL that's horrible.

Not to derail the thread too much about automated combats but I think it's at least vaguely relevant...

The nuts and bolts of automating combat are actually pretty easy. Entering your action, rolling initiative, and then iterating through the actions inflicting damage or effects... you could code that in a lot of systems. In fact, the original versions of my +combat were for B5MUSH (which used a sort of oWoD mortal-only homebrew) and BSP (which used FUDGE). There was nothing FS3 about it.

What makes FS3 unique is that the mechanics are optimized for MUs. There's no concept of "holding your action", for example - not because it's a bad idea, but because it would disrupt the scene flow too much. There's nothing like: "Oh, he just shot me, I'm going to activate my Iron Skin power to soak the damage better..." or "I'm going to allocate half of my dodge pool to this attack and save the rest for the next one..." or "I'm going to try to riposte..." or the other more 'interactive' combat mechanics that you might find in a traditional tabletop RPG. There are also no creative powers, like, "I'm going to put ice under his feet..." because okay, how would you model that effect with an automated action? (rhetorical question)

That kind of stuff is what makes combat systems difficult to automate, and why MUs trying to use traditional RPG rules for even GM-ed combats get so bogged down. There's just too much back-and-forth.

One of the last things we're working out is Valor. Valor replaces glory for Valorous Dominion; simply because Glory has a large tie to chivalry. Valor is very similar, fame and reputation, status and standing, gossip in the shadows and glory on the lute of musicians. But, it's not really chivalrous. Vendetta is a large part of daily life for the nobility, and thus courage to act and defend honor is a sign of valor. Likewise, it is reputation. Doesn't have to come from good deeds; best example I can think of is Cersei Lannister's walk of shame. It may have been humiliating, but her courage to do it or her gumption to do it in spite of everything might have bolstered her reputation from the event.

House management and Vindicti are systems in place. One of the uses of house commodities is to hold social events, sporting events, tournaments and the like. Not only is this a way to impress/turn the ear of NPCs of influence, it is a way to increase house reputation. We are focusing less on combat (it's there) as a means to gain Valor, this concept is similar to hosting tournaments in Pendragon. The net 'glory' is instead awarded to the house as reputation. Individuals that attend the party gain 1/10th that reputation as personal valor. It will mirror the levels of glory for tournaments, with a progression for importance of the event; one can raise the level by attracting influential/famous NPCs to the event. The easiest way to get an NPC to show up is spending of house or personal reputation to draw them to the gathering, increasing the reputation for the house to host such notable individuals and, thereby, increasing personal valor for being in attendance at prestigious events. We're hoping a lot of the drive to gain and earn valor is player driven.

Another implementation post-opening we are planning is a quirk/hook/goal system. We're not requiring any of these for characters, but those wishing to add them and play them out will be rewarded. Our focus in the system is on houses, anything we don't see is something we won't know about. Using this system will prevent reliance on +requests to earn Valor, but like all systems it will take effort and this will require logging on some level to supply to the system as proof of goals. Rather than define levels of goal/quirk/hook involvement, it will be by the month and the amount of scenes/etc in which the goal is worked on or the hooks played out. No matter how many listed, there will be a limit of Valor awarded per month.

All that said, we are settling on an opening of Monday (23rd). It's a full opening and we're sure there are plenty of things missed or overlooked. It will come with changes, code fixes, theme clarifications and anything in between. Once we open it will be a persistent setting for the characters developing. We could call it alpha, but even if anything needs fixed changed, the characters, there will be little cosmetic difference as the story persists.

@owlhome Just wanted to say, thank you for doing this. 🙂

I will bounce off what @coin said to pitch Part-Time Gods, not post-apoc/post-god(s), but I like how it manages to have basically a superhero "all-spark" mythos but not be drowned out by an all-encompassing metaplot or setting focus. I personally find it awfully human, which is to say I think it would make a good Mu*. I would play it as an optimistic future, knowing that the gods in our past were complete dicks.

Think it's been said pretty well already, but why not say it again... Original world. Borrow as heavily as you like from one of those other settings, but make clear that it's not that thing.

I know it's not a great example, but when we ran BITN (a WoD MUX), we said "there are vampires, and we might borrow from WoD vampires, but they are not WoD vampires. They are original vampires." and everyone was happy with the response. Something to orientate yourself helps. Keeping it original otherwise seems to interest players.

Traveller.
Babylon 5.
Mass Effect.
Transhuman Space.
Fading Suns.
Dune.
Blade Runner.
Borderlands.

Really anything but Star Wars, Star Trek, or D&D in space (Spelljammer and Planescape are acceptable because they are unique and haven't been done to death yet.)

I've decided to go with a generalized Yakuza theme in the future, sort of a mixture of Shaun Sans Pants' old Yakuza theme in a purist's form, Chicago MUSH's Mafia as a rival faction, and MotM's Interpol (as viewed by their player Daniel) as the heroic faction. I'm going with a loosely Bladerunner technology level, so we have the boomtubes, 'Strange Days' drugs, Rumsfeldian warfare for the Shadowrun military corporate ethic, and the 25 cities on top of a very simple one-room-per-continent grid.

I'm taking my project 'Neo-Tokyo Nights', which I've determined is Daikatana, and making a much more simpler 'Katana', without releasing Daikatana and ruining myself.

I'm calling it 'Yakuza MUSH', and it will essentially be a corporate criminal versus street mobster versus mercenary cop game, which sounds very boring, except you'll have a neat combat system I've designed where you build experience very simply and advance rapidly at first, but slowly upwards, with more experienced players having a superb advantage (it's just harder to get to the higher levels).

The combat system is really the centerpiece, the entire MUSH is a showpiece for the combat system.

@arkandel
It's highly dependent. For a couple of the games I was involved with the restart of, it was either 1. due to unfixable issues or 2. the game ended without good resolution, and players were interested in picking up immediately from where they left off.

@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

That's what I think @Ganymede was alluding to with "you barely even noticed it" on BSGU. There were enforced travel times, but I took care to set up most of the missions so the travel time didn't inconvenience anybody.

Exactly.

Like, if you were in a starship on a Star Trek game, and you were traveling from Omicron Persei VIII to Betelgeuse XIII, it might take 7 days to travel there. So, you couldn't really do any land missions during that time. What you could do, though, is schedule social gatherings and events during the travel time, which can always be suddenly interrupted by a mischievous Q or some random deep-ass philosophical event that shuts down the warp core because your ship's counselor is having some weird Betazoid psychic freak-out or something, I don't know.

@arkandel said in A Game of Thrones MUX Discussion:

Guys, please respect the OP's request. Make a different thread for the copyright stuff.

Why not split it off and move the posts so the discussion isn't split up (or, since I think it's pretty talked out, so it isn't buried in a random thread for posterity).

@thenomain said in World of Darkness -- Alternative Settings:

I certainly can't go to sphere meetings, which is the closest thing I can imagine being a forced scene, without considering a good stiff drink to prepare me for all the player-drama.

Xanax is a godsend for this shit.

@faraday said in Favorite Minigames:

@thenomain Dunno. Think that distinction is in the eye of the beholder.

Too many eyes.

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@autumn said in Demon: the Descent:

This version of Demon sounds a lot like Mage, tbh. Or rather: if Mage were played as if the Seers were an overpowering threat, and not drawing their attention is extremely important to your continued existence.

That's an interesting analogy and one that makes me dislike Demon a little less.