#WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?
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Double post to answer original question (oops). Neither. Both. It is a lack of cohesion between staff vision and player desire that causes this. Too many games try to keep it squarely middle of the road to appeal to the most players, while we have what seems to be a great disconnect between players who want adventure and not dark, and players who actually want dark.
Which leads to either games where nothing truly interesting or compelling ever happens. Or games where the staff and player visions are so at odds it leads to stife.
Games should be clear about what they are from the start on the darkness spectrum. And players not comfortable with darker themes should learn to exclude themselves from those games, instead of demanding that games be less dark so they can be comfortable there (and, naturally, players who want dark in an adventure setting should self-sort as well - it goes both ways). Some compromise is fine. But trying to please everyone will please no one.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@derp said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
It is a lack of cohesion between staff vision and player desire that causes this. Too many games try to keep it squarely middle of the road to appeal to the most players, while we have what seems to be a great disconnect between players who want adventure and not dark, and players who actually want dark.
I have played these games since I can't remember when, certainly all of my adulthood (past age 18). And I've been on MUSHes for this time as well.
My best experiences have come when there is staff adhere to their themes and settings. The Reach was about an End of the World scenario, and, by golly, it happened. Requiem for Kingsmouth was about vampire politics, and it delivered. Fate's Harvest is about remote, small-town life for changelings, and it certainly feels that way.
I've played PCs of all stripes and backgrounds, and have had a blast.
I can't tell you if anything has, or needs, to change. It seems to me that the availability of other, active games have minimized interest, and that, in my opinion, Old World of Darkness games seem rosier because that's the only World of Darkness to dwell in. What I can tell you is that I don't honestly give a shit what or where I'm playing, as long as I'm having a good time, and I don't feel that I'm wasting it.
Maybe people just expect more.
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I have never ran into issues with staff bitching about my campy stuff. I don't really think most staff even reads logs posted on their wikis, and those that do rarely go "Hey this group is having fun, fuck em up".
I think this is a total nonissue.
The problem with camp only comes when it polutes theme. For example, making a League of Doom composed by Bale Hounds, Strix, Cursed Mummies, Praecipati and Critters for your plot. That shit needs to be nipped at the bud and I love me some Critters.
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@Derp - If only if was more like Supernatural! I'm actually rewatching the series and so inspired to run plots I can't hardly see straight XD
The magic of Supernatural is that it doesn't take itself seriously. There's room to have fun and be goofy and go to those crazy, wacky places with it. But then you also have these amazing NPC's, like Pestilence, Death, and Loki. Death's entrance to the series is just... Amazing.
It could very well be different thresholds for grimdark, too. Me, I can watch Saw and munch blue-rare steak like 'wut?'. I try to temper that when I ST because not everyone has a cast iron stomach and enjoys that kind of gore. Or the darkness found in Hostel.
So, if I have this right, it seems like the theme is alright if it's oppressive, but it's more or less up to the ST's, Players, and Staff to try and find that balance between too dark and too campy?
And maybe some 'take it seriously, but not too seriously', otherwise it is too oppressive on an ooc level?
It sounds like this a turning into a case where it falls back on the usual culprits of 1) Staff expectations and flexibility between hardlining theme or being flexible enough for that mix of styles to exist 2) Players and ST's communicating about what they want, need, and expect from a scene(s), and 3) that handy +prefs code @Cobaltasaurus came up with to help people get there and find people that'll play to the level the different player-types are wanting.
I would even toss out the idea of Staff being open to more ideas from players, but players being willing to go to staff with suggestions.
And not just the usual 'what do you want, well too bad we're not doing that' sort of lipservice a lot of games give, but actually implementing the suggestions that come in when you get players to talk to you.
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For the most part, campy adventure gone bad is just a weird waste of time.
Grimdark gone bad will ruin a character and a game for me. It's also a lot more likely to actively go bad in the first place.
I like the idea of it, and I think there's room to play with actually grim, dark themes, but I'm really wary of it on most games. And I'd be extremely wary of a any game that advertised itself as being grim dark because it's the World of Darkness and not the world of puppies. Generously, 7/10 that's just going to come across as material for some edgelord's written porn folder.
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I like it to be more in the Dresden Files range.
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@taika said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
The magic of Supernatural is that it doesn't take itself seriously. There's room to have fun and be goofy and go to those crazy, wacky places with it. But then you also have these amazing NPC's, like Pestilence, Death, and Loki. Death's entrance to the series is just... Amazing.
What I like about it is that there are no if's or but's about how the supernatural corrupts all who meddle in it, and not in adorable "sure, I'm wearing the Dire Doom Necklace so I'm kinda grumpy but I just use it to kill bad guys better" but rather in "*I'm going to end up trying to murder everyone I love within the next couple of days" kind of ways.
Also Hunters are badasses and they know shit... but they are facing things way more powerful than they are, and they don't know nearly as much as they need to, other than when they are fighting the most typical monsters. Sometimes they get lucky, else they need to hit the books and hope they find something they can use as a weapon somehow, else they are toast.
That's not because of the settings though, it's because of how we as players have traditionally set up our games. Characters are very often as or even more powerful than the antagonists they face, and they expect to know a lot (in fact, nearly everything) about what's happening through rolls. So what in a plot could have been a full arc of fact finding it's either handled in a random +job (which with Academics 3 and Intellect 3 mean you get 2 successes on average so it's basically a given), and then you just outnumber and outgun the critter to put it down.
TL;DR: It's how we implement games that's been failing us thematically, not the original systems and settings themselves.
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@arkandel said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
@taika said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
The magic of Supernatural is that it doesn't take itself seriously. There's room to have fun and be goofy and go to those crazy, wacky places with it. But then you also have these amazing NPC's, like Pestilence, Death, and Loki. Death's entrance to the series is just... Amazing.
What I like about it is that there are no if's or but's about how the supernatural corrupts all who meddle in it, and not in adorable "sure, I'm wearing the Dire Doom Necklace so I'm kinda grumpy but I just use it to kill bad guys better" but rather in "*I'm going to end up trying to murder everyone I love within the next couple of days" kind of ways.
Also Hunters are badasses and they know shit... but they are facing things way more powerful than they are, and they don't know nearly as much as they need to, other than when they are fighting the most typical monsters. Sometimes they get lucky, else they need to hit the books and hope they find something they can use as a weapon somehow, else they are toast.
This. This is what I view as a dark situation - being outnumbered and outgunned and having too little knowledge and having to scramble to keep ahead. I'd play that to death, but there's just not much opportunity to . I'm still waiting for the limited XP game to come along, but it seems like all the new games are going for the tier system, which I don't understand because stuff like:
That's not because of the settings though, it's because of how we as players have traditionally set up our games. Characters are very often as or even more powerful than the antagonists they face, and they expect to know a lot (in fact, nearly everything) about what's happening through rolls. So what in a plot could have been a full arc of fact finding it's either handled in a random +job (which with Academics 3 and Intellect 3 mean you get 2 successes on average so it's basically a given), and then you just outnumber and outgun the critter to put it down.
TL;DR: It's how we implement games that's been failing us thematically, not the original systems and settings themselves.
is just not fun to me, and I don't understand people who want to play the gazillion XP vampirewerewolfmage and win with no cost. I agree with the other person who says they don't really see many dark WoD games out there, because if you're going to explore dark themes, then there has to be cost and consequences and in most cases, that just doesn't exist.
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Remember on Haunted Memories when someone received an abortion via baseball bat?
LOLs. Good times.
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“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain
For me, less that and more I was tired of Tonberry. Suppi-chan was on my brain due to the recent Cardcaptor Sakura sequel series though.
ETA: @Lisse24 I've wondered the same thing sometimes, and I think a lot of it boils down to a lot of players don't find the game as engaging if they're not growing. Which I get, but I wonder if it doesn't hurt a lot of the player vs. ST expectations too.
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@lisse24 said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
is just not fun to me, and I don't understand people who want to play the gazillion XP vampirewerewolfmage and win with no cost. I agree with the other person who says they don't really see many dark WoD games out there, because if you're going to explore dark themes, then there has to be cost and consequences and in most cases, that just doesn't exist.
But that's the thing. It's not the XP. You can make some pretty damn powerful characters with relatively little - practically right out of CGen - so you can get good academic rolls, some melee, some firearms, etc.
The problem is people playing to win, not systems that can't be beaten. It's on us.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
@lisse24 said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
is just not fun to me, and I don't understand people who want to play the gazillion XP vampirewerewolfmage and win with no cost. I agree with the other person who says they don't really see many dark WoD games out there, because if you're going to explore dark themes, then there has to be cost and consequences and in most cases, that just doesn't exist.
But that's the thing. It's not the XP. You can make some pretty damn powerful characters with relatively little - practically right out of CGen - so you can get good academic rolls, some melee, some firearms, etc.
The problem is people playing to win, not systems that can't be beaten. It's on us.
It's also not a problem of players being too powerful compared to their antagonists, but rather the antagonists being too weak. Okay, you have your super-powerful vampire; I, as an ST, am going to ramp up my antagonists, then. It's a matter of scale, and surprise, the ST can always win the scaling game, because we don't need XP.
The problem is that players expect to win, like @Arkandel says (god that hurt to type). They expect to win because they "put a lot of effort into all this XP to be powerful" or whatever, or "this isn't really fun for me" if they aren't winning or if they're getting shit on by the antagonist. Adversity in MUs is something you play in your downtime, apparently.
I played in an IRC Exalted (tabletop style) game for like two years or something and my character was constantly shit on by this Abyssal who juast kept showing up and beating the living shit out of me. Like, "almost dead" several times. Eventually, I figured out his style, his powers (after he'd used every single one of them on me) and then I built a combo that let me shoot him in the face. And I didn't even kill him, one of my Circle finished him off.
And it was the best time because I felt like my character had earned that victory.
Most MUers don't really feel that way.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@coin Sometimes people like to play a game of chicken. Am I going to kill them off in some random Wednesday evening PrP? No? Then hellz yeah they'll stick around to fight when I say "you can hear reinforcements arriving! Thankfully after you rummaged through the Bad Guy's desk you discovered a secret passage out" two and a half hours after we began.
Some throw the rulebook in my face. Anecdote: Back on BITN I ran a PrP about a portal into some weird-ass mystery dimension. One of the mortals in it afterwards made a +job (without consulting with me first), CC'ed me to it, +rolled Academics into the +job and then paged me to give them the answers about how the portal was made and how you can open one or close one yourself. When I tried to work with that by offering some tidbits of information it turned that no, they wanted the full thing. Look, Academics, Library 2, 3 successes, gimme the full manual goddammit.
Obviously as you get more experienced you learn to handle these people but it still serves to explain why STs are hard to find, new ones are shy to start running things, and the ones already playing run things for their own circles since they won't have to handle anyone.
It probably also helps explain why new games keep running into the same loop of trying to do something different thematically but end up looking like the previous five MU*; it's because the players they get are treating it exactly like their last five MU*, too. There's a lot of effort of behalf of staff to change that mindset, and it's not surprising most don't even try.
like @Arkandel says (god that hurt to type)
Your pain... it sustains me.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
Sometimes people like to play a game of chicken. Am I going to kill them off in some random Wednesday evening PrP? No? Then hellz yeah they'll stick around to fight when I say "you can hear reinforcements arriving! Thankfully after you rummaged through the Bad Guy's desk you discovered a secret passage out" two and a half hours after we began.
Yeah, I've run into this several times too. It's like as long as they think death is off the table, folks will fight long past the point at which it ICly makes any sense to fight. There was one time when the PCs literally charged down a tunnel into Cylon machineguns, WWI style, even after I repeatedly warned them.
Now you might say "Just kill them, then they'll learn" but we'd still see gung-ho stuff like this on TGG, the king of PK. It's just a player mindset issue. There are some folks who like adversity, who see failure as the building block to more interesting stories, but most? Just flat-out don't.
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@faraday said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
@arkandel said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
Sometimes people like to play a game of chicken. Am I going to kill them off in some random Wednesday evening PrP? No? Then hellz yeah they'll stick around to fight when I say "you can hear reinforcements arriving! Thankfully after you rummaged through the Bad Guy's desk you discovered a secret passage out" two and a half hours after we began.
Yeah, I've run into this several times too. It's like as long as they think death is off the table, folks will fight long past the point at which it ICly makes any sense to fight. There was one time when the PCs literally charged down a tunnel into Cylon machineguns, WWI style, even after I repeatedly warned them.
Now you might say "Just kill them, then they'll learn" but we'd still see gung-ho stuff like this on TGG, the king of PK. It's just a player mindset issue. There are some folks who like adversity, who see failure as the building block to more interesting stories, but most? Just flat-out don't.
Question: how easy was it for people to make a new character on TGG? How long did it take to approve new characters?
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@coin said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
Question: how easy was it for people to make a new character on TGG? How long did it take to approve new characters?
Super-fast. It was pretty fast on the BSG game I mentioned too.
My point with TGG was that if you have a higher PC death rate, you can end up with people just not getting invested in their characters, as opposed to people actually being more cautious.
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@faraday said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
@coin said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
Question: how easy was it for people to make a new character on TGG? How long did it take to approve new characters?
Super-fast. It was pretty fast on the BSG game I mentioned too.
My point with TGG was that if you have a higher PC death rate, you can end up with people just not getting invested in their characters, as opposed to people actually being more cautious.
Right. But part of the investment is at chargen. If it is very easy to make a new character, a lot of people (not everyone, certainly not most, but not an insignificant number) will just not give a shit.
"Excuse the hell out of you. He's a bag of dicks. I'm a carefully curated box of cocks." -- to @GirlCalledBlu upon being misrepresented.
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@coin said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:
Right. But part of the investment is at chargen. If it is very easy to make a new character, a lot of people (not everyone, certainly not most, but not an insignificant number) will just not give a shit.
Yes, but that's still a player issue not a system issue. I don't think "make chargen a PITA so people won't want to risk their characters senselessly" is really a good solution to the problem.
