G Gilette
Aug 18, 2017, 2:37 PM

@Apos

Interesting! It does feel a bit ridiculous to be saying 'shit's fucked' to the idea of there being a few thousand players around. Less so, however, when you factor in time zones, schedules, and the fact that I imagine the MU ecosystem is more like a series of independent habitats than something with permeable layers. I mean, we see it here on MSB. There's your WoD players, your Lords and Ladies, your comic-books, and so on.

For example, logging into any MU during my timezone evening, I would be lucky to find maybe 3-4 people who would be active and less so willing to scene.

However, it astounds me that MUs can have so many people on and so few people doing anything.

These days I get all my RP on Champions Online of all places. I think MUs in general could, and should, borrow from conventions of MMO RP more than continue trying to beat the dead horse of tabletop RP (after all, MMO RP is basically MU RP just with a shorter parser and some graphics that no one really considers). MUs are not tabletop games. Tabletop games are, typically, around half a dozen people who have some sort of friendship or connection. MUs are basically randoms trying to herd cats.

Make that as easy as possible.

Generally, my points are what @Rook said. Some of these are with the idea of having less players in mind, others are more general.

  1. Narrow the RP. While it was alive, I thought Coral Springs was great for this. All characters were members of the same superpowered academy and everything was set around one seaside town. That's enough breadth to allow for just about any concept but enough limits that any other player could know how to interact with any other player.

  2. A general pushback towards pick-up RP. On a lot of games, there's been an increasing penetration of +scenes code. That is, code that allows players to have access to a schedule that allows them to more easily signal when RP will be happening. A great idea, particularly when involving various timezones, but it often seems to lead to a 'one scene per day' culture. And a culture of people just not logging on if nothing is scheduled. If there is a big push to people becoming passive, I would put this right near the top of possible reasons.

  3. Push people to go out and RP. The big reason why I RP on CO is that, well, I can log in, hit up the social hub and find 20-30 other people at any one time who are basically down to social RP. From social RP, I might form an OOC chemistry. From there, more detailed RP. Now, it's not necessarily high-quality RP, but that's okay -- and it leads into my next point...

  4. Dispel the notion that 'more words = better than'. I would rather have a few quick lines to create a tense, exciting back-and-forth dynamic than waiting ten or fifteen minutes for two or three paragraphs. Something verbosity or detail is appreciated, but often it is meaningless. If people can only afford to log in for an hour or two, then there are ways to make it a good hour or two.

  5. Active staff who model the above behaviors -- without thinking this makes them some kind of martyr. I'd say something like this is key to combatting the players who are lazy or entitled. Like it or not, staff are more than custodians of the server who keep the lights on.

  6. Truly consider whether XP systems are necessary and beneficial to any particular game. As much as I like having some numbers and stats, there are plenty of games I've played on with XP which I've never ever spent. I think you need a simple system for conflict resolution and that's about it. I would be interested in seeing a MU run with something like the PDQ ruleset.

  7. Actually utilise the unique aspects of the MU medium. Let players create things, let players affect the world. If people feel a sense of connection, they might be more inclined to stick around and do things. It's one thing to have Generic Bar and it's another to have Generic Bar where it says that my character is the local pool champion, y'know?

  8. Consider reaching out to other communities to find players. This whole hobby needs a transfusion of new blood and it needed it years ago.

I think the key thing is that this hobby needs to find some way of modernizing itself. That doesn't mean reinventing the wheel but it sure as hell means acknowledging it exists. MU games are a unique art form but they're also basically 20-30 years old, designed in a world of different people, different technology and different expectations.