Game Stagnancy and Activity
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@Sparks Yeah very strongly agree with all of this, and I felt I learned a lot from the Siege of Arx and how players responded. Especially that people really like to run PRPs. There's been like 120 run during season 1. That's way, way, way, way more than I expected.
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@Tempest said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
Sounds like a pretty great community over there, congratulations on that.
Meanwhile, on WoD MUs, most people can't bothered to type +bbread once a week.
Until Fear and Loathing, the early version of Reach was one of the only WoD games I'd been on where the board posts weren't mostly lots of fragmented stuff that was ultimately inconsequential to basically anyone except the people involved.
When a game is a glorified sandbox, why am I taking time out to read board stuff that will never, ever affect me or be acknowledged by staff as mattering to the rest of the world?
I read posts on games where the world actually matters, and thus the board posts matter.
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@Apos said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
@Sparks Yeah very strongly agree with all of this, and I felt I learned a lot from the Siege of Arx and how players responded. Especially that people really like to run PRPs. There's been like 120 run during season 1. That's way, way, way, way more than I expected.
...dang. Though now I am wildly curious what percentage of those 120 were specifically during the siege.
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@Tempest said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
Pretty sure that's the opposite of a personal problem. But whatever floats your boat, Gany.
No, what I meant was that the people who can't bothered to type +bbread once a week have a personal problem. At least, the personal problem I was harping on.
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@Sparks 516 events total so far, looks like about 54 of the events were PRPs during the siege. That's just a rough guess on the times they were run and the names.
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@Apos said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
@Sparks 516 events total so far, looks like about 54 of the events were PRPs during the siege. That's just a rough guess on the times they were run and the names.
So if we assume like... 40 of those 54 were PRP events (which seems not impossible given what I remember of the siege activity), and given your rough number of 120, maybe a third of all the PRPs run so far happened during the siege?
That seems almost too high to me, but I suppose I wouldn't be 100% surprised. I mean, if that's the case, that really bears out the "carve a channel and the PRPs will flow through it" theory. Make it easy for someone to run a PRP and they will, especially with the possible @randomscene bonus for GM'ing.
I almost wonder what would happen if you put together pre-made PRP 'kits' next time there's a major event like that: "here are the stats for this type of enemy", "here are some tips on how to run it", etc. How many players would pick up those 'kits' to run with, folding their own story bits around them?
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@Sparks said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
I almost wonder what would happen if you put together pre-made PRP 'kits' next time there's a major event like that: "here are the stats for this type of enemy", "here are some tips on how to run it", etc. How many players would pick up those 'kits' to run with, folding their own story bits around them?
I'm thinking tons. I think a lot of people would run things more but are hesitant for a variety of reasons (speaking in general terms here and not specifically about Arx) - feeling uncertain about the system, not knowing what to run, thinking people won't show, etc - and any scaffolding you can offer to help overcome that is going to get a positive result.
Also, if we're remembering a previous person saying that you can usually only get 1 or 2 people to run PRPs and Arx is looking at that volume of PRPs being run, well, that's more than 1 or 2 people. I'd love to hear @Apos's view on what's going right there. Obviously, some of that is going to be just volume of players, Arx is a big game, but what else is contributing to the wealth of plots?
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Speaking anecdotally, I noticed (and commented) that there were WAY more PRPs during the siege, and I was happy since that lent it a bit more 'realness' for the people involved. But I definitely agree that having a way to tie them in/together that works better would have served to do more.
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@Lisse24 said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
Also, if we're remembering a previous person saying that you can usually only get 1 or 2 people to run PRPs and Arx is looking at that volume of PRPs being run, well, that's more than 1 or 2 people. I'd love to hear @Apos's view on what's going right there. Obviously, some of that is going to be just volume of players, Arx is a big game, but what else is contributing to the wealth of plots?
Well it's an interesting question there, since I'm with @sparks as well in being taken back by the numbers and there always being more than I expect. Like I was floored that we are approaching 5000 +firstimpressions made, and even with us deleting messengers past 30, we have 30361 message objects currently. So I think there's always a lot more activity than anyone would expect, as long as the environment encourages people to be proactive and fosters and rewards positive behavior that generates RP for other people.
And I think that point there is super critical. Like I've never played BSG:U but I think it's very telling how highly everyone that plays it speaks of the game, and it's by all indications a standout game, and from my impression it sounds in large part because it has an outstanding environment that again fosters RP. The scales are different, and I think smaller games tend to have much better environments because of how much personalized effort that can be given that makes people feel really a part of things. My goal on Arx was to try to get as close as I could to that even if we grew larger than I planned for, once it became extremely clear I wasn't gonna have a 20-30 person game. I feel like I cheat by abusing Tehom's saintlike nature in creating code that lets me automate the boring things that would be required in giving people the tools to mimic that as close as I can.
Which takes us back to the original point of the thread. A big take away is that games are extremely susceptible to shifts in environment, because as a collaborative creative hobby, it's really about how motivated everyone involved is in creating. And like, if you set up an environment where everyone is waiting on everyone else to do something, it's going to fail. Or if an environment is created where there's pushback anytime someone tries to do something fun, or create RP for anyone else, it'll fail. Or if staff that drive story get burnt out from dealing with people that treat them as adversaries, it'll fail. Like I get super pissed at threads when I see people shitting on other's plans for making a game- it's super easy to be a negative nancy that does that, and it's -really- hard to be someone that keeps their motivation through it. It's also why I get really annoyed if I see anyone being a dick to @faraday or @sonder or other game runners even if I'm not playing a game with them and it's unlikely I ever will - like christ, what they're doing is -really- hard, and it's like nothing short of a miracle that some of those good game runners read that shit and keep their motivation through it. You would think people that want games would stop making it harder on people to run them and be successful at them.
ANYWAYS. Climbing down from that soapbox, and going back to the question, it really just comes down to the environment. If you give people the tools, and reward them, and make them feel like a part of the story for doing it, they are going to go nuts with it.
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@Lisse24 said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:
@Apos Exactly. It's a balancing act to find enough change where people feel impact, but not so much that people feel like things are coming out of the blue.
By the way, I think HBO's The Leftovers should be required viewing for people running plots on MUs, because I think they hit that sweet spot perfectly. On that show, Big Things happen: 2% of the world's population disappears, cults swindle people out of money, a nuclear bomb goes off, BUT the story never focuses on those things, the story focuses on how those things affect people and how people's personal reactions to the Big Things flow from and cause more Big Things. The Big Things are never important. How they impact people's lives is what's important. The result is a fantastical story that feels real and grounded, impact is always felt, and when something comes out of left field that people didn't see, the reaction afterwards is "Oh, well, that makes total sense, how could we think anything else would happen?"
Now taking that sweet spot and getting it into MU form? That's the hard part.
I had to bow out of The Leftovers midway through the first season because it just wasn't the sort of show I wanted to spend time with at the time, and it was not funny the way I'd imagined it would be because of the Tom Perotta book. But I should totally binge it now, I always meant to get back to it.
I do love that aspect. In the book its almost even more so...like you never know why the people disappeared ever, you never knew a lot of major plot things. They just happened, and then the story was about how various people coped with all of it. Perfect analogy for a MU
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I have to agree with Pandora. If you want to encourage public RP you also have to have good place code to make it manageable.
Players will zerg rush any public scene that get above 3 people so you have to have the ability to handle that expansion of people that allows the scene to incorporate the new people without totally crushing the scene the initial folks were having. Plus places cuts down on the spam from large scenes which is a lot of the issue with large scenes to begin with.