Eldritch - A World of Darkness MUX
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@Eerie
go ahead and release Hikaru from the Forsaken. I have lost inspiration for him. Perhaps another time. -
Okay, this is the promised head's up regarding the Demon slots I'll be reopening tomorrow!
At the moment, it seems like I will have seven demon slots to pass out. This could change depending on if people suddenly wake up today and complete their apps or drop out, but this is my count for the moment.
Tomorrow at roughly 11 AM PST/2 PM EST I will toss up a bbpost called 'Demon Open'. After that I will take the first seven +jobs submitted requesting a slot. This does not need to be a concept or anything other than a request for a slot. Concepts and chargen will come after. Submissions that come in before the post goes up will be closed and told to resubmit when the post goes up.
This is obviously not perfect but it's the best I got! Good luck!
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I feel like you should hold some kind of RL Mortal Kombat style event, where players will slug it out.
I can only imagine it would be amazing to behold.
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@HelloRaptor Totes.
"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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This post is deleted! -
I ran something like that at a LARP years ago. Everyone had a blast.
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@Coin said:
@Arkandel said:
@Coin said:
@Arkandel said:
@Thenomain Do you think the game's ready for the opening day? In terms of CGen, handling XP spends, etc?
... cries laughing ...
... then laughs crying ...
Ah, the joys of staffing. Are you enjoying your power and authority yet?!
Gimme two weeks. I'll let you know after I've murdered your PC and used his entrails to fuel my metaplot.
... I'd make a PC purely to be the entrail fuel for such as this.
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So with the spheres having caps and such, what room is there for mortals and mortal+? Are there any "factions" exlusive/catered to them to join and work around/in?
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@FiranSurvivor AFAIK non-full Supernatural templates aren't capped in any way. You could always even make a Wolfblooded character (for example) and have an in-game First Change when the sphere has room.
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The Sanctity of Merits rule makes transitioning from a minor to a major template almost wholly painless, which is am-a-zing.
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@Arkandel said:
@FiranSurvivor AFAIK non-full Supernatural templates aren't capped in any way. You could always even make a Wolfblooded character (for example) and have an in-game First Change when the sphere has room.
I still don't understand how this prevents storyteller burnout, truth be told. Are the stories focused on full-on supernatural characters? Because it seems tha 2.0 is really focused on the agency of the minor templates.
I mean, that totally might not be what's going on, mind you. It just... I dunno. Kind of seems weird to me, as a policy. Sphere caps on full supers to prevent ST burnout while not capping anything else seems to ring of the idea that everyone else is secondary.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@Derp said:
@Arkandel said:
@FiranSurvivor AFAIK non-full Supernatural templates aren't capped in any way. You could always even make a Wolfblooded character (for example) and have an in-game First Change when the sphere has room.
I still don't understand how this prevents storyteller burnout, truth be told. ...
Sphere caps on full supers to prevent ST burnout while not capping anything else seems to ring of the idea that everyone else is secondary.I think you're making certain assumptions here which aren't necessarily true.
Storytellers aren't affected by the size of a sphere. When I create an +event I pick how many (or even which) people are able to be in it.
What is affected is staff, because each additional person comes with an overhead; even if a lot of things like XP spends are automated someone still has to process their backgrounds for CGen, field questions, fix things that went wrong, handle OOC issues, etc.
Smaller spheres represent a higher workload for things which have little to do with plot on their own, at least directly. They do have something to do with plot in the way that a staff member who wants to also be a Storyteller themselves might be too swamped in menial work to do so, but that's another issue.
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Everything else is secondary. What 2.0 does more is a better job of providing ways in which the minor templates can participate (such as by making them more competent) in major template stories.
But a mortal is still going to, by and large, generate far less work for staff than a Proximus or Wolfblooded or Ghoul or whatever, who in turn will tend to generate far less work for staff than a Mage, or Werewolf, or Vampire.
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Had to gank this from the other post, but:
@Eerie said:
. The reason for the sphere caps is it's essentially our best guess of how many people we can actively ST for in a way that makes the game feel exciting.
It's ... not really an assumption when the staff says that's the reason for it? And even if that's the case, and it's about workload, there's still gonna be the same number of players, if they're really interested in playing.
To be fair, I understand a sphere cap as a starting-out measure to get your feet on the ground, but unless you're capping everything then this doesn't make a lot of sense, and will eventually create bad blood because ... people hang on to characters.
I'm not sure that I agree with your sentiment there. Anyone can create as much work as anyone else. Simply believing that the full-on supernatural characters are going to be the most active and involved is reaching.
ETA: To be clear, here, I think that Eldritch's staff have been fantastic so far, and I understand why they crafted the policies. I'm not claiming that there's some grand and diabolical conspiracy. I'm simply wondering if maybe the policy as it's been crafted is going to produce the results that it says are desired, and if not, perhaps it could use some polish. It's meant to be a constructive discussion, not a harsh criticism.
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It's ... not really an assumption when the staff says that's the reason for it?
I suspect that's just an issue of miscommunication, and she was using ST in a way to mean staffing in general. Non-storytelling workload is still workload.
I'm not sure that I agree with your sentiment there. Anyone can create as much work as anyone else. Simply believing that the full-on supernatural characters are going to be the most active and involved is reaching.
You're free to disagree as you like, but it's always been true, and it's unlikely the recent changes will make it any less true. The things Mortals and Mortal+ types require staff support for are very rarely as involved, rules intensive, or contentious as full template supernaturals. The simplest way to put it is that the more moving parts something has, the more options that exist, the more ways it's going to be a pain in your ass. Werewolves have whole suites of stuff they can do, how they interact with the world, that are unavailable to Wolfblooded. Same with Ghouls and Vampires, etc.
A Vampire has all the same stats as a Ghoul and Disciplines and specific stat-linked social groups, all of which adds up to the average Vampire player generating more work over time than the average Ghoul player. Werewolves even moreso since they have an entire subset of shit that inevitably requires staff adjudication in the form of spirits, Fetishes, the effects of Rites, etc.
That's not to say any given non-major template person can't create the same volume of work for staff without any of that, but that's by far an exception, not the rule.
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@HelloRaptor I'm just looking forward to a game that hopefully is run to be a game for the players, not some extension of staff's need to be important (as some places seem to become). A place where if I play 5 hours a week or 50, to staff I'm still a player with equal rights as other players. And even if IC I'm an asshole (because you know, I'm playing a monster) people are smart enough to see that its IC and not me OOC. A place where staff events can be inclusive to all spheres and hopefully, HOPEFULLY a place where cross-sphere shit happens. On top of that if someone is asking for a beat down/pk IC that it can happen if it needs to happen.
I keep hoping Eldrich will be this place and so far the staff has seemed to be pretty cool and it all looks good. But, we are 1 Spider away from shit being crazy (if the talk on threads here are to be believed).
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@Derp said:
I mean, that totally might not be what's going on, mind you. It just... I dunno. Kind of seems weird to me, as a policy. Sphere caps on full supers to prevent ST burnout while not capping anything else seems to ring of the idea that everyone else is secondary.
This is absolutely not the case. In fact, I would say my most active, gung-ho player right now is playing a mostly-regular human. I adore her because she was the first and thus far only person to respond to my post offering to throw some plot at anyone who raised their hand, brought five people with her to the scene, including both a werewolf AND a demon, spun that scene off into a whole evening’s worth of RP for all of them and has submitted three separate jobs following up with what she wants to do and investigate next.
This is kind of my ideal for players on Eldritch. I feel like as soon as PRPs started to be the thing and staff as STs less so, staff across various MU*s convinced players that they ‘shouldn’t bother staff’ more than they absolutely have to, and I hate this. I want to be bothered. I want engagement. I want this sort of proactive player who wants to poke at the world and try things and investigate stuff and change things, and even better if she’s willing to drag other people into the mix along the way. Which... is why I said STing and not staffing, and why we need sphere caps.
We’ll see how it goes but we have deliberately tried to keep ‘admin’ work down to the absolute bare minimum. We’re not doing inventory systems. We will (soon, fate and @Thenomain willing) have players doing their own XP spends for the most part, with a few exceptions for stuff like Status that staff will still want to squint at a bit. I have plans to sort of crowdsource to our players a lot of stuff like building, some plot elements and STing, various other things, and our plan was always to have MU*-wide reviews every six months were we all get together and talk about what’s working and what’s not. Part of this is because I want to build a sense of community and investment among everyone so that it feels like ‘our’ game, but part of it is because @Coin and I love STing first and foremost, and we want to spend as much of our time as possible doing stuff related to stories, not WoD accounting.
So why cap Supernatural Templates and not humans and minor templates? Here are my two best, most honest answers:
Demand – We did a soft opening for like a month and we had a paltry few people interested in this, even after working out ways to roll their mortal and mortal+ characters eventually into the supernatural they were waiting to play. Meanwhile, most people continued to log on and chat in the OOC room. They were just not that many people interested in playing minor templates. If I logged on tonight and there were 40 mortals and mortal+ characters in the approval queue, I bet we’d cap everything. So far that hasn’t happened, and in fact most often this comes up in the context of ‘it’s the same amount of effort to staff for a wolfblood as a werewolf’, and the unspoken second half of that is ‘... so just let me play a werewolf because I don’t want to play a wolfblood’. And therein lies the difference, because I can thus far leave stigmatics uncapped and not be subsumed in a tide of apps, but if I did that with Demons I would be divining keys and interlocks until the end of June at the earliest. So it’s that, and...
It sucks to tell people to go away – I am very excited about the world that we’ve made and dying to see what people do in it. I also know that, just at this particular moment, there are a lot of people looking for a place to play they can get excited about and, while there are a lot of things in development, not a ton of them are available yet. Eventually they will be and I expect that the whole community will hit a nice equilibrium, but we’re the first of them open and here we are. I also know that nothing we have done here means a thing without players, and all the world building and STing and policies and code in the world mean jack unless you have players willing to really buy into things and who are excited and have some modicum of faith in the whole thing and want to tell stories with you. So even though I know that what we want to do is just simply not feasible with a game of 500 people, and that none of us want to run The Reach 2.0... it feels wrong to tell people ‘no, we don’t want you’ because people are what makes any MU* great.
All that being said, this is an experiment of sorts based on what we think will work, and who knows if it will! Like I think, in my naivety, that having readily available plot that is not dependent on who you know or what position you hold ICly will really foster a cooperative experience among everyone. I think that a lot of the bitter battles you see on MU*s that spill over into OOC are in part because there is not much happening and so people are fighting to be in a position to be the guy who gets to handle the tiny bit of plot that there is. In that situation, the reason that it turns OOC is because one player is actually going to win and the others are actually going to lose. So what I want for Eldritch is to see what happens when the guy who wins does get the fun plot... but so does the guy who loses. And the guy who is snickering at both of them and not even fighting this particular battle. When everyone can have access to plot and stories and interesting things happening to them, I have hopes it will mean that people can relax and enjoy whatever happens more, because from a fun standpoint, everyone is going to win.
But, again, this just will never work with a giant, sprawling game. It will only work with a medium sized community of players who see a return on their investment in what we're doing. So I don’t expect sphere caps to ever go away entirely, but I do hope that eventually there will be a lot more really good options of places to play and they will start to matter less because of that.
Edit to add: I also want to say our players have been incredible so far and have volunteered and built stuff and offered code and all kinds of help and been super supportive of what we want to do and each other, which is the best part. I feel really lucky we've gotten off to the start we have on the whole, despite a few glitches.
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Thank you for the clarification. This was helpful.
It cleared up a lot of my confusion. I've been having fun so far, I know, so none of this is particularly make-or-break for me, but I do appreciate the forthrightness and willingness to discuss/explain! -
@Eerie
I love you Eerie and I can only hope that the next game I run turns out so awesome at the start of it. -
@Bobotron said:
@Eerie
I love you Eerie and I can only hope that the next game I run turns out so awesome at the start of it.I feel like I should just close now so I can go out on a high note. Goodnight Internet! Mic drop!
(<3)
