WoD MUSH Comparison?
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Social RP is pretty much what MUSHes are, though. You are interacting with peope. People who may be talking, people who may be punching, people who may be doing other things entirely, but you are interacting with people. if social RP isn't what you're looking for, then... I dunno, isn't that was MUDS are all about? Swish-swish-stab style stuff? I was under the impression that MUSHes were about interaction between people, not all action, all the time. I could be wrong. I'm only a year into this. Take it with a grain of salt.
Having a vision for the game is fine. You definitely have people that will try and back you up on it. But remember, it's going to grow as its popularity grows. The players are ultimately the ones who are going to create the game as it is, and that's something that just kind of can't be avoided, either. We can try and make it whatever it was supposed to be in the first place, but even with people saying RP is hard to find, etc, it's still more popular than it was intended to be, and only looking to grow further. Artificial stops can only do so much. If players want to do a thing, it's been my experience that they will often try and figure out a way to get included and do things despite limitations, if they want it badly enough.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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You're right, a lot of MUSHes are about social RP. The thing is, nWoD MUSHes are based off a tabletop system, so translating that to a MUSH means you can reasonably expect some tabletop constructs, such a monster of the week plots. I should probably make some distinctions about social RP, too. I don't really want to RP going to the bar and making small talk about the weather and the local sports. I can do that IRL, plus real booze. I'd love to RP going to a bar and finding out about the ghosts haunting the old house on the corner of Oak and Vine, and then going to check them out.
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So then grab a group of friends and do it! One of the beautiful things about NWoD in the GMC era is that you can literally make your own funsies with it. Find two or three people and run plots for each other. Your PC can even be in them, just try to let the other people have the spotlight. That's really one of hte primary ideas of Packs/Rings/Coteries, is that it's a group of players who are going to make fun for themselves, and then staff will attempt to include them in staff-run things when it's possible. But the staff, especially on Eldritch, are rather limited in number, have limited time, and are facing a lot of overhead and administrative stuff, so relying on staff to run all the things isn't really something that you're going to find a lot of fun in, because it's not going to happen.
Staff have slow, long-term, game wide plots that people get picked up in piecemeal. Monster of the week style stuff is what staff are leaning on players to provide. And you don't even have to have it in a plot. All the xp is awarded in beats, and beats are relatively easy to acquire even in that social scene.
Use the Conditions system. No, really. It's great.
Use Aspirations. They, too, are fantastic.
Throw out some rolls. Fail one, take a dramatic failure, make a scene happen. You not only fail to impress JoeBob, you heel breaks and you end up throwing your drink in his face as you faceplant the floor. That's a beat.
Go out and find situations in which you risk breaking points, etc.
There are so many things that can be done that waiting on staff to throw a monster at you is kind of counterproductive to the goal you're looking for. Grab a friend or two, or start running things for people. It will get contagious. Ther are plots and scenes going on all the time, but it's because players go out and do that social RP, get to knkow one another, and then run things for people they think they have a feel for. +events also occur, but are less common because people lean toward specialized plots that tailor to a particular group's strengths.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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I am. Just not on Eldritch. There's a lot about the construct of the game I just find hard to get into.
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@Derp What @acceleration is saying is that the RP searched for is not TS, is not lets go on a date, is not lets chill at the <insert name of establishment here> and talk about our FEELS and/or the weather ALL THE TIME.
Its lets have some action, lets RP about it. Lets plan, lets have social RP and lets have PLOT, story, something.
At least I am guessing that's what's meant from the conversations we've had.
Like @Coin said, I'm guessing the problem is on us and not making it happen for ourselves. We'll look at shaking that up a bit to see if it helps.
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@Derp said:
Find two or three people and run plots for each other. Your PC can even be in them, just try to let the other people have the spotlight.
YMMV but I could never do that. If my PC is directly involved in a scene I'm running I'd be too self-conscious about it - am I giving him too many breaks? Am I trying too hard to not hog the spotlight? Awkward all over.
I just need a good excuse for the character to not be present and his friends can go off and get themselves into grand adventures without him. Those jerks.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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I tried that for awhile. Then it backfired all over me when people were like 'Well your dude was supposed to be there and it turned into a total fucking flakefest when you didn't show and we had X Y Z happen'.
So now I have my characters essentially as the minor support character. With the current mostly-useless wolfblood, that's not a hard thing to do. Werewolves start fighting I worry about Kuruth, and I cower as far away as I humanly can be with a very fast motorcycle ready to go in case people lose their shit, cuz ain't nobody who isn't a super can fight a werewolf, much less three or four of them.
Stupid gauru.
But yeah, it's not that hard for me, and I suspect that generally speaking most people won't care -too- much, so long as they get some swings in equally. But I totally see your perspective on things too. Either or works, really. Just saying, it's not -required-., so people can still partially make their own fun and have their people included.
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@Arkandel said:
@Derp said:
Find two or three people and run plots for each other. Your PC can even be in them, just try to let the other people have the spotlight.
YMMV but I could never do that. If my PC is directly involved in a scene I'm running I'd be too self-conscious about it - am I giving him too many breaks? Am I trying too hard to not hog the spotlight? Awkward all over.
I just need a good excuse for the character to not be present and his friends can go off and get themselves into grand adventures without him. Those jerks.
Yeah. Storytellers bringing their own characters is a recipe for making other players feel awkward. However good your intentions are, it's pretty reliable that you're either going to be too easy or too hard and probably not as useful as you would normally be, for whatever reason, and that nobody should react to that reason later because it's just a pretense for not stealing any shows, if you went that route. If things randomly target, would Other Guy not have gotten killed if your PC hadn't been there? If things aren't randomly targeted, why did Other Guy get targeted instead of your PC?
Even the very best of us aren't above being being influenced by our subconscious, so how much did your PC being there change the outcome, if that outcome was undesirable and/or not fun?
Awkward all around. Someone bringing their PC along is generally a good enough excuse for me to bow out, for all those reasons and so many more. Reasons you can't ever really do or say anything to circumvent.
This is one of the reasons I dislike werewolf on a MU*, because someone inside the pack running pack stories either can't participate or suffers from the above, and staff rarely has the attention span to run stories for packs anymore.
Ideally the best way would be for packs to run things for each other, but frequently the people who know and like one another well enough to be willing to do that on a regular basis tend to end up in the same pack to begin with. Plus if there's any kind of conflict between packs IC it makes things OOCly awkward for some folks.
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@HelloRaptor To me it seems odd to think this should be the norm, I mean I get it and I've done it with friends. Where we end up having our own little slice inside of the game, but, what about the other 50 players? We never interact with them? Its seems very counter intuitive to the idea of a system that brings people together to RP.
Maybe it is what it is, but, one thing I can say about TR... It was a place where I was able to get into a ton of different events and interact with other PCs for good or bad.
Then when it's all over and the rest of you are ready for Dead Animal Pickup, I'm gonna go balls deep into Dahl. But only because she asked me to. Sweet-like. - Riddick (2013)
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@ThatOneDude said:
@HelloRaptor To me it seems odd to think this should be the norm, I mean I get it and I've done it with friends. Where we end up having our own little slice inside of the game, but, what about the other 50 players? We never interact with them? Its seems very counter intuitive to the idea of a system that brings people together to RP.
What does any of that have to do with whether or not a ST brings their PC into a story they're running? o.O
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@HelloRaptor Ooops, that should have been to @Derp
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I don't know, man. This has almost universally almost always sounded like absolute horseshit to me.
Some of the best plots I ever ran had my character smack dab in the middle of them, urging the plot forward. I didn't steal spotlight, I didn't make things easier or harder. A few times they've almost died, even, but not because I went too hard. That's just how the dice rolled. I used my character to move the plot along. Sometimes they were a bit more NPC-ish than others, but so what?
I think that the level of awkwardness regarding inserting your own character in a scene you're running is almost entirely to do with the level of comfort and trust that the other players are willing to put in you, and how you present yourself as a storyteller and a player.
Are there people who will use the opportunity to steal the spotlight and highlight their own character among the others? Sure. But you can't throw a rock in the world without hitting an asshole, and MUs have a higher density than the real world as a matter of fact.
I guess what I mean is: you can have your own prejudices about this, but don't forget that they are prejudices, and not some universal truth. It's not 'it doesn't work out because it is an inherently bad thing'. It's 'it doesn't work out because often people are assholes'. But that's true for everything. We often remember the bad and take the good for granted, and if you had bad experiences with people running plots their own characters were in, and you let that color your opinion and influence whether you go on any of those again (even with other players and not the orgiinal offending party), that's on you.
And that's perfectly fine. But it can and has worked out to everyone's satisfaction in the past.
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Sigh.
On HM, we Changelings wouldn't wait for things to happen. I understand that people think that "plot" is a definable thing, but stop it. Stop thinking like that. Seriously, stop it. Everyone who thinks like that, stop. To those who lament the lack of plot, please stop mis-attributing the problem. A lot of people don't need permission to act, but have been whipped by staff out of trying.
Un-learn this. Become responsible active participants. Stop thinking about plots.
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I think that the level of awkwardness regarding inserting your own character in a scene you're running is almost entirely to do with the level of comfort and trust that the other players are willing to put in you, and how you present yourself as a storyteller and a player.
That's such a bullshit sidestep. Why do we not allow staff to do their own xp spends, set their own notes, make rule calls about situations their PCs are involved in right then, etc? Why, if Bob and Joe just got in a huge OOC screaming fight at one another on the channels, do we generally not let Bob's staffbit respond to a PK situation Joe is in with somebody immediately after?
Because no matter how much we might trust those people 99% of the time, no matter how much we believe they would absolutely try not to let their conflict of interest interfere, people make mistakes. If Joe dies as a result of the scene, is it ever going to be possible to say that Bob's fight with him didn't slant any of the rulings against him? If Joe survives but the opposing character dies, is an accusation that a shitty call was the result of him overreacting to trying not to penalize Bob and going too far ever going to be answered without reasonable doubts?
While you're correct that the issues some people have can stem from a lack of trust, we can trust someone to do their best and not deliberately make calls or decisions based on their PC being in the scene, while still being uncomfortable with the situation because of uncertainty over the unintentional weight it puts on those calls or decisions. Did Bob get taken out of play because you kept your PC back when it could have intervened, because you didn't want to take the spotlight and thought someone else would do it? How about because you rolled a random number for attack of all PCs present, and Bob got hit because your PC added to the count, when otherwise it would have hit Joe instead who would definately have survived? The awareness that the only reason he went down was because the random outcome was influenced by your PC being present has nothing to do with trust in you and everything to do with the easily focused frustration that your PC being present provides, because getting upset with a randomly generated number isn't very satisfying.
You can think it's horseshit all you want, but on TR the complaints about people STing scenes where their own character was present was fucking rampant, and was almost never about them grandstanding or stealing focus or anything of the sort. It was about bullshit randomness that was easily blamed on them, or how they didn't step in to do the thing everybody knew they could, but nobody felt like they could take them to task IC since people OOCly understood they were trying to not be That Guy/Gal. Or bitching about some PC gaining IC benefit from the outcome of the scene that his player ST'd for his own pack/coterie/etc. How far does trust go when there's a pretty direct line of benefit from Bob running a scene for his pack and Bob's PC also reaping the rewards they bring back?
Meh. I've no doubt there are people who don't give a fuck one way or another, but let's try not to pretend it's not an entirely reasonable issue that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with trust.
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WoD is one thing, but this is actually dramatically different in several other genres. It's not an entirely reasonable issue across the board -- it might be entirely reasonable within the context of the games you enjoy/play on/play in, but it's nowhere near as universal as you're presenting it. It's rather the norm in at least two genres, every LARP game I've ever played in/was a storyteller for, and I'd say in 75% of the tabletop games I've played, the GM has a character in it. .
People bitching on TR really shouldn't be used as a litmus for something being reasonable or not.
Edited to add: As an example, I played on a game for a while that to get certain abilities, you had to run the plot for yourself / your character and include other people. This is far less cut and dry than presented.
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@HelloRaptor, I disagree. That's still about trust.
But then again, I also never run scenes with my character in them and then pretend my character can't do something that would be applicable to the scene. Instead, I build the scene in a way that my character is only helpful in things that move the plot along for the other characters where it comes to things that only my character can do.
So it's about trust, and it's also about storytellers not being lazy and actually putting some thought into what they're running. When I ran combat stuff with my combat-capable Sin-Eater, he was in the thick of it, usually off to the side. Maybe he was handling mooks, and so something he could do easily had to be done by someone else, or whatever.
A few times he just stood there and let other people handle it because he was mentoring them and being a jerk about it.
It is about trust. It's also about storytellers not writing themselves into a corner. I mean, shit, I thought that was a given.
"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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I also think, at least if it's a group not randomly put together minutes before, that the plots should be geared towards the people in the scene.
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That's kind of what I mean about support character. Like, in the scene I ran about a week ago, I had my character handling some occult stuff and giving some general background exposition as to why X was at Y place at Z time when they otherwise probably would not have been. I used him to set up some of the scene, handle some of the minor details of things that allowed it to move forward, etc. Exactly what he would have done once the other stuff started. Once the combat started, though, and it was time for the other person to shine, my guy sort of just observed, and made helpful commentary using mostly mental skills, kind of like those NPC narrators in video games that serve as mission control and give relevant details as they become important. Are they there? Yes. Are they the focus of the story? No. But they're still doing what they're supposed to be doing, etc.
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WoD is one thing, but this is actually dramatically different in several other genres. It's not an entirely reasonable issue across the board -- it might be entirely reasonable within the context of the games you enjoy/play on/play in, but it's nowhere near as universal as you're presenting it.
WoD, D&D, Pathfinder, Shadowrun, basically any game where potentially lethal conflict is pretty common.
It's rather the norm in at least two genres, every LARP game I've ever played in/was a storyteller for, and I'd say in 75% of the tabletop games I've played, the GM has a character in it.
My condolences. Like I said, there's going to be people for whom it's not an issue. If you're one of them, more power to you.
People bitching on TR really shouldn't be used as a litmus for something being reasonable or not.
TR was used as an example because it's the single largest game that @Coin and I both played on the most recently. Since it's been a thing at basically every MU* and tabletop game I've ever played in, I could make the list more expansive, but I didn't think it was really necessary.
I disagree. That's still about trust.
Since you're just ignoring shit and repeating yourself, I'll bow out.
A++, @Coin, you're totally right.
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@HelloRaptor said:
I disagree. That's still about trust.
Since you're just ignoring shit and repeating yourself, I'll bow out.
A++, @Coin, you're totally right.
Man, I was gonna reply with a long thing, and then I was like, nah.
TL;DR: different roleplaying cultures see these things differently and nWoD MU players in general suffer from a very narrow view regarding what is acceptable in these circumstances and what isn't.
Alas, c'est la vie.
