Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed)

[Gingerlily]

@Thenomain said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@Gingerlily

I think you and I (and possibly also @Three-Eyed-Crow and probably also @Ghost) are trying to bend the consensus that "non-constructive" doesn't always mean "using insulting words".

On Wora (since we're now merging this thread and the MSB Meta-Discussion thread), the exact rule was, "Attack the idea, not the person." This is what @Arkandel was reminding people of. I'll be honest I didn't think that @bored's original argument was attacking the person, tho I think that he and @surreality did slip into that without using the same four-letter words that Ghost did.

Here, the exact phrasing is, "Something besides the equivalent of 'NO YOU'. That shouldn't be hard, right?" But this isn't a rule. We were pretty hard-assed about the rule on Wora, while here we are, coming close to discussing what "constructive" really means. I think we can both agree that "no you" happened before Ghost raised the middle finger.

But then, we're both +1ing each other so much that people might think we'd need some alone-time. I'm not just preaching to the choir here, though, I promise.

Agreed, We don't want to creep people out with the +1s

I just think it is so easy to pause for a moment and consider 'what is the purpose in expressing this thought this way?" and also the 'Is this going to be hurtful to someone' and if it is then 'Why does hurting them feel okay to me?' Different people have different feelings, introspection, etc about that kind of thing. But I think if more people stopped to ask those questions, some of the dialogue here would be different. Not all. Maybe not even most.

This is usually the kind of thing people dig their heels way into on however, because whatever their opinion (be kind, treat others with patience and respect) to (Let it ALLLL out, people have thick skins, they can take it, trash those who deserve trashing!) or something in between, they got their via their own stuff. C'est la Vie or something.

[Paris]

@Thenomain said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

I think we can both agree that "no you" happened before Ghost raised the middle finger.

Yeah.

Edited because I can't format.

Editedit: I think surreality should ignore the nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking (people will say worse); but I don't get how nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking is constructive.

[Arkandel]

@Gingerlily said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

I just think it is so easy to pause for a moment and consider 'what is the purpose in expressing this thought this way?" and also the 'Is this going to be hurtful to someone' and if it is then 'Why does hurting them feel okay to me?' Different people have different feelings, introspection, etc about that kind of thing.

True, and everyone has different policies on how to approach the issue. In that way I'm usually less cautious around my friends (or at least people I've known for a while) since I sort of have some awareness of their tolerances; a joke I crack in Ganymede's expense might not go over very well with a near stranger.

And (I'm sure) folks who know me also know I can take a hit - sometimes we're mean around here, and occasionally I do a double-take when someone snaps at me over an unexpected topic, but at the end of the day I hope we're all still... generally okay with each other. Friends, internet friends, co-players, whatever it is.

The list of people I actively dislike in all of MU* is tiny. There's a much longer list of people I like, though. As long as the fact remains I'm sticking around with this hobby of ours.

[Templari]

This may have been asked already. Will there be singing crabs? It makes them easier to catch and them steam for my pirate mateys.

[surreality]

I will, probably, pull this up to continue private tinkering at some point.

I agree with @Three-Eyed-Crow's point, re: 'timing'. I figured that being clear I was asking specific questions and intent on focusing only on those specific questions would be clear enough in the constructive section of the forum, because a silly writeup that is deliberately campy is not what I consider any sort of real preview or pitch. I figured that was clear; that it was clear to most folks is honestly good enough.

I am not and have never been interested in crowdsourcing a game on a forum. As it says in the first post, I have no interest in the cavalcade of gloom-and-doom predictions that people flail over with wild hyperbole, or the laundry list of "it's gotta have"s that people pile on any time there's even a suggestion of a new game potentially existing. I am not Santa Claus, and I have zero interest in that job.

@bored can sling all the shit and make all the accusations (s)he likes; (s)he's on ignore and will stay there. The last laundry list wasn't even worth responding to as it is, and the folks who have pointed out that it was not a good idea to respond to the hand-wringing about worst case scenarios were right, and it pulled things further off course. @Ganymede's quote from else-thread puts a great deal into perspective on this front. And, no, I still don't think (s)he was deliberately being an asshat here in order to promote another game.

If there's something similar to the questions above, I'll just throw together a poll to aid in specificity, but that's still quite unlikely. It would clutter up the forum with polls, which strikes me as being super attention-whore-ish, and is exactly what I was trying to avoid doing with a catchall thread instead for specific and typically easy questions over a broad span of topics.

For the small handful of folks who did get an actual preview... those links won't work any longer. I'll be maintaining that domain name if I decide to stick with it, and when things are ready for review, it will work again. (And no, I'm not just going to stick it under my surreality.wtf random projects domain like I have done with other dev projects, no matter how appropriate that might actually be in this instance. Yes, I actually bought that for precisely that sort of thing, and as a place to house the generic droplet some day.)

Ultimately: things are pretty bleak right now, y'all. Not because of this -- the amount of work put in may be non-trivial but the project itself is fairly trivial -- but due to a lot of real world things going on that, well, whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses are, that about sums it up. If anything, this thread has proven there are definitely outlooks considerably more bleak and fatalistic than mine at the moment, so maybe things aren't quite so bad as they seem.

Re: This forum: This forum? Is fine. People who forget it isn't WORA, well, that's on them. Me included, when I let myself get sucked into it.

[Gingerlily]

@Thenomain said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@Gingerlily

I think you and I (and possibly also @Three-Eyed-Crow and probably also @Ghost) are trying to bend the consensus that "non-constructive" doesn't always mean "using insulting words".

On Wora (since we're now merging this thread and the MSB Meta-Discussion thread), the exact rule was, "Attack the idea, not the person." This is what @Arkandel was reminding people of. I'll be honest I didn't think that @bored's original argument was attacking the person, tho I think that he and @surreality did slip into that without using the same four-letter words that Ghost did.

Here, the exact phrasing is, "Something besides the equivalent of 'NO YOU'. That shouldn't be hard, right?" But this isn't a rule. We were pretty hard-assed about the rule on Wora, while here we are, coming close to discussing what "constructive" really means. I think we can both agree that "no you" happened before Ghost raised the middle finger.

But then, we're both +1ing each other so much that people might think we'd need some alone-time. I'm not just preaching to the choir here, though, I promise.

P.S. I did not +1 this purposefully, but in my heart I did.

[surreality]

• Picking this back up.

• Leaving all the stuff where it is so people have full history so they can decide for themselves if all the things are horrible or I'm evil or whatever else. The thread's history is the thread's history; the record is the record. It's relevant to some folks and I'm not going to fuck with that.

• Please try to re-rail and divert tangents to tangent spaces.

• Please look at what is actually presented, not what you're afraid might be the case.

• If you're afraid something might be the case, please ask before slinging shit at your assumptions or fears and trying to hit me in the face with it in the process. You'll get the most straightforward answer, even if it's brief, available.

• Sometimes that answer will be "I don't know yet./I haven't decided yet."

• I am not going to get into the weeds of a lot of detail yet. There's plenty, but it takes a lot of time to put that into the game and the wiki as it is, so putting it here before it's ready is not helpful to anyone: you don't get the full picture and the full picture becoming available to anyone gets bogged down if not stalled out entirely.

• I am probably going to ignore the standard doomsayings and wishlist-demand stuff on the whole as best I can.

• I'm interested in doing a number of things differently. Some of those things address a number of the wishlist and doomsaying things; in a lot of ways the game is an experiment designed to see if the over all approach works.

• No, I don't know if it will work. I do think it's worth finding out. If you don't, that's OK, too.

There is, actually, a reason I'm asking the stuff I'm asking now, rather than earlier or later. It ties in pretty directly to the 'doing things differently' approach I have in mind and also to the question I want to ask.

I am looking to create a cooperative, collaborative environment on the game. This means, in part, that the 'final tiny details' bit isn't actually a thing, but is intended to be an ongoing process on the game while it's running. As in, the game world is meant to be organic, and to grow with player contributions in a more direct way than is normally the case.

All info that is not required to ensure player privacy (IPs, alts, complaints, personal info, email, etc.) or related to the resolution of currently running plots (read: the 'here's the list of ways to resolve this' final chapter of any given game module) is public. Sheets are public and on wiki. (This means the sheet's page histories, along with who adjusted what and when, are also 100% visible to players and visitors alike, not just staff and the individual charobj; if anybody is up to some funny business in that regard, it's exposed to the whole world.)

This means:

• Players have access to all the same information about the world and how it works as staff. No 'staff only' secrets (save for that 'last chapter of the module' note above; this applies to player plots as well!) that could prevent players from being able to run something "because it would interfere with that thing we can't tell you about" (that sucks for everyone).

• It gives players the tools to construct things that really do fit the game world in a consistent way. No WoD-style 'and this is how this splat thinks it happened... ' over and over with no clarification as to what really happened. This gets problematic because it doesn't give much of a guide as to how to handle the inherent contradictions; that's handled. Each group has its own ideas, but that's for the characters to believe IC. Players get the tools to know the real scoop, and that gives people a better ability to make things -- be it a character, build, new power, urban legend, etc. -- that don't break things.

• ...and this is important because players will be able to add things like that. Some at any time, some at specific times. Custom content powers will have submission periods, for instance, but new build areas (even as 'I think it would be neat for there to be a... ' projects people wish to take on) or creative interpretations of events or creatures in the game world can be added as lore at any time, to serve as plot seeds or shared resources for the entire game.

• This means that no matter what skill a player has, they are able to do something to contribute if they want to. This is something usually reserved for staff, and while staff would need to check things over with a glance to make sure nothing breaks? It's something valuable. It is awesome to see the things you made being enjoyed, and that's a privilege players absolutely should be able to share in as much as possible. People want to have an impact on the game. Opening up new avenues of doing so creates options beyond the usual 'blow shit up if anyone lets me, which usually they won't' by letting people create, too.

• Recognizes that there aren't only some talents that are valued as contributions to the community of the game. Someone may not be comfortable enough with the rules to run a plot or a monster-of-the-week style event, but they may have a brilliant idea for one they can add to the game's lore, or to the list of random weird creatures -- which in turn can inspire a scene runner to pick up that idea and run with it when they're looking for something to do. Again: cooperative, and collaborative. Let people use their strengths, whatever those strengths are; recognize their value.

I think of this in terms of 'toys'.
The grid is a toy. Creatures are toys. Story seeds (lore) are toys. Powers are toys.
Any given game is, essentially, a toy room with some rules to keep the peace and prevent people from pulling each other's hair or doing all of the other things we learned as far back as kindergarten were Not Nice and Equally Unnecessary.

I'm interested in the OOC side of the game also functioning as something of a toy workshop, where people can make contributions to the game world over time. This shapes the ultimate direction of the game a lot, and it's based on what people are actually interested in, not what people guess players might be interested in from staff side, or from a random poll question or bbpost every so often. (It also means... there's no 'final polish' point to ask some of these questions.) Part of the fun, here, is intended to be in being able to take part in the game's ongoing creation more directly than is currently the norm, and sharing the new toys (ideas) that emerge along the way to create an engaging, entertaining, and fun story for those who want to participate with those things.

Currently, the tools set up or in the works for this include:

• Lore: Look at something in the game mechanics, world cosmology, history, etc. and come up with an urban legend, sighting, 'historical account', or similar thing regarding that thing, with a twist of some kind. It can be a very realistic interpretation, or it can be a complete hoax. It can be the sighting of a whale that someone mistakes for a sea monster, or the corpse of a giant squid washing ashore that is clearly a sign that the Kraken is real (we get these today, still, after all), or similar twist that someone can use as a story seed or incorporate into a plot. Others can then add further 'accounts' -- from their own dealings as a PC, or from fictional NPCs -- to enhance the story, call it out as clearly bunk (whether it is or not), and so on.

• New Build Areas: "Why don't we have a creepy skull island? We should have a creepy skull island!" OK! Suggest it. Either run with it and build it, or get some folks together interested in doing so. You don't have to own it or run it; if you think it's something that would be cool to add and explore and fun for yourself or others and it fits the setting? You are welcome to build that thing. "Why don't we have a... " is a problem everybody can have a part in solving if they want that thing and it makes sense.

• New Traits and Powers: These get submission windows, because they're grindier to examine. Guidelines for how the various powers and so on balance and are set up cost-wise/etc. will be available for folks to work from. (This is why one of the first questions was a general call for ideas like this; I want to have a good sampling of them up and running from the start not just as options, but as examples.)

• NPCs: That guy that keeps coming up as a random reference at the last stool in the tavern? That baker who you mention every time you're in the market? That gossipy barmaid? Write up a little blurb on them on the wiki. Let others use them. This helps sustain the game's consistency when everybody knows who Molly the Loudmouth barmaid is, etc. (These aren't the same as things like retainers and so on in WoD that you 'own'. You can obviously write those up, too, but these are NPCs for people to share on the game and use as/when needed, or to potentially use as a redshirt/roster 'extra' for a scene.)

• Factions: Players can absolutely create their own factions in game. These can be families, secret orders of this-or-that, a private militia, a pirate crew, etc. and manage them as they see fit. (Staff-run ones will be present that will accept all interested parties, player-run ones can be invite only if they want, etc.; any major political organization ex: British Navy, Spanish Armada, French Nobility will be staff-led factions as they should be open to all, but players are welcome to build a specific crew of a ship in either as a player-run faction without stress within that sort of organization.)

• Shared Timeline: Still being tinkered with codewise, but a shared timeline for the game. Players can add information about their own histories (or the histories of the elements above they've created) for this, to create a shared timeline of events. Logs will show up by date within the timeline, including cutscenes and backstory logs.

• Equipment and Widgets and McGuffins: Pretty much what it says on the tin. Adding standard, existing items from the period that aren't extraordinarily obscure isn't much of an issue. (Impossible tech, is, however, out. First person to pitch a mobile phone gets a temp ban so I can prove I'm a petty tyrant.) Weird, enchanted, magical relic, or similar items aren't out of the question but the guidelines for them and their creation are still in the works. Crafting will be a thing, see the previous re: guidelines.

• Old-School Ambience Emits: These have fallen out of favor (sometimes for a reason when they're horrible or overdone), but I'm using them. Some are simple things people can turn off like weather or time of day and so on. Others are something a little more complex and intent on specifically adding something cool as story-food to the game: a haunting that happens in a room every night at 3am, a ghost ship that's sighted from port every night in January, a ghostly procession climbing the mountainside carrying torches on a special night of the year that's long been rumored. Simple things to throw into a randomizer on a public build or complex ones to tell part of a story or add to a plot are welcome. Want to write up something that reinforces a lore element or plot? Go for it.

PrPs, one-off events, rumors, and business or residence builds are a given. (And there are probably some of these I am forgetting.)

Player XP incentives will be granted for contributions of these kinds because they all add something to the game -- they become new toys in the toy room for people to share, play with, and enjoy. (Amounts still in the figuring. XP is also a different sort of thing; not going to discuss it right now; too big a derail.)

I get that a lot of people probably think this is ridiculous and will not work, is a dumb idea, or does not sound at all interesting or worthwhile. That's OK; I'm going to do it anyway.

Question: are there other aspects of a game you have wanted to see opened up to input this way? Small or large. Sometimes something that seems incredibly trivial at first can wind up adding great value to a game in the long run.

Question: while all of these things have a variety of options, are there any specific options you'd like to see included for any of those listed above?

[Ganymede]

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

Question: are there other aspects of a game you have wanted to see opened up to input this way? Small or large. Sometimes something that seems incredibly trivial at first can wind up adding great value to a game in the long run.

Will there be a mechanism for resource management and territory/realm improvement? If so, how would players go about engaging in this?

[surreality]

@Ganymede I'm looking at options for that. That gets the little hand-wiggle gesture tipping back and forth. If there's a feasible, reasonable, low maintenance for all parties way of going about it that doesn't require a landslide of code and micromanagement, I'd like to.

There are skills and tasks, for instance, set up for cultivation of various sorts that I think would key into this very well, and could encourage building and development of neat and/or original and interesting areas. (I am an old school grid person. I like sprawl with weird nooks and crannies.) At the same time, I don't want folks just building things to get the equivalent of free bennies out of the deal.

I also don't want to turn it into a grind.

Thematically, resources of various kinds and scarcity are very relevant to the setting. The task I know everyone will immediately mock the crap out of, for instance, is 'find water' under the survival skill, despite the fact that it's literally the #1 survival skill noted in every 'how to not die if stuck somewhere inhospitable' guide ever written, and the entire grid more or less counts as such. Running out of fresh water without means of acquiring it was absolutely a ship killer as much as any cannon fire, as an example, and people trying to establish plantations or settlements on islands surrounded by sea water are absolutely going to need wells and irrigation and similar. (On some things, system-wise, I want to try to avoid going off into the weeds, but that one specifically is relevant enough to the realities of the setting that it's getting included.)

That said, I wouldn't make an issue of it directly in terms of 'how much water do you have access to' unless something in the IC story side of things warranted it -- for example, if someone's ship was adrift thrice as long as they planned for, or if someone was settling a camp and setting up a plantation on completely undeveloped land, yeah, somebody's going to have to roll that eventually and 'we might actually die' is an IC reality for people to have real concerns about. Would I ever demand a group all actually die and lose their characters from that? Uh, no. But IC, it's something the characters would have on their minds and have real cause for concern about.

The whole economy/commodity economy issue isn't something that would be player-created and managed in quite the same way as the things I'm describing, though, beyond, say, someone crafting items for sale or trade. I'm tackling forms for the input of stuff like the above and skills primarily at the moment, so those skill-focused things (crafting/etc.) are being considered in those terms first.

I have no desire to turn the place into something more MUD-like, where people need to mine X amount of gold before they can make a ring to sell, and similar things. By the same token, a farm is only going to produce so much of whatever it's growing, regardless of how many rolls somebody does.

The most likely thing will be a trait people can buy that accounts for 'what is the maximum productivity of my holdings in X', and people can put in rolls to see how much of X the get out of it every <interval>.

There's a huge issue, though, and it is... there is no overstating the hugeness of it. It's 1715. People are considered to be a commodity in this period in a variety of very not-remotely-OK ways. That... yeeeeeeeeah, that's going to require some very hard looking at. I refuse to handwave the ugly reality of that out of the world itself, but I'm coming down pretty hard on the side of 'there are some commodities we will not be using for trade here' on that front.

[Seraphim73]

@surreality First, let me say that the wiki entries for NPCs, and the shared timeline are awesome ways to keep everyone tied into the world and each other. The one thing that I will warn about (having tried to do the shared timeline on The 100) is that most players won't bother to put their information in there--if you want it there, you or some other designated person will probably have to go through their BG and put it there.

As for your actual questions, I think you've covered most of them -- Input on new areas, new lore, new characters, new abilities, new mini-factions, new gear... that's pretty much everything. The only thing not on the list is making sure that the players feel that they can change or (semi-)control the path of the metaplot. But I sort of assume that that's table-stakes for you.

[surreality]

@Seraphim73 Metaplot is not a thing. There will be staff-run 'seasonal' plots as are discussed a bit more in depth in @tragedyjones's thread (er, one of the recent ones), but no single core metaplot.

There's a reality regarding how the world works; if people push certain buttons, the world will respond in a variety of ways. That may inspire anything from a monster of the week to a season plot, really, but the idea of one sweeping, over-arching metaplot to rule them all is one I stringently avoid.

That's writing a story and expecting people to play along.

Better, IMHO, is to make something that responds to what the people do effectively.

[Seraphim73]

@surreality Sorry, I was using metaplot imprecisely. I meant 'larger stories, generally run by Staff, that tend to provide the majority of inertia to a game experience.' I think that that would be the 'seasonal' plots. If you're planning to respond to players pushing buttons, that's awesome -- it's my favorite way to GM, and to play, personally -- my one concern (although that's a totally different topic that we totally don't have to get distracted by) is that many players are way too must-be-spoon-fed to make this work. Maybe these seasonal plots can be the way to tie them in and nudge them into poking at the world around them.

[surreality]

@Seraphim73 There are actually some things to do just that, or that have the potential to do so. This is a bit of a sidenote but it's one I think is worth mention.

Some folks are 'call me when it's time to go bust heads' folks, or 'call me when it's time for the political meeting' folks, and that's fine. That's the crowd that needs the structured events a little more, since that's what they're looking for.

Me? All RP has value, so far as I'm concerned. This includes making use of downtime for RP, rather than just idling in rooms to chat on channels or seeking boredom TS. (Boredom TS is fine, too, obviously, if it's somebody's choice rather than 'there's nothing else to do, may as well, I guess'.)

I do not believe in considering downtime between formally organized PrPs, plots, or even pickup GM'd scenes to be 'lesser'. A lot of times, this is where people find a great deal of organic back and forth (...with or without the boredom TS... <rimshot>) that helps people develop their characters, get into their heads, and let the "reality" of events in the game world sink in. This includes scenes like dressing wounds after a battle, discussing how some things worked and others didn't in IC terms, going off drinking to celebrate a particular victory, reuniting with a long-lost family member that finally arrived in the area, and so on -- all of these scenes can have a major impact on the characters involved.

Some folks have no interest in scenes like this, and that's OK. Other folks practically live for scenes like this and enjoy them considerably more than the bouts of cinematic action, and that's OK, too.

Most games don't place much, if any, value on scenes in that second category at all, and base everything on how much someone is or isn't risking under the eye of a GM. Risk is definitely a factor -- but it's a factor, it shouldn't be the only factor that matters.

What matters should be: does this add something to the story of the game somehow?

So there are a number of incentives designed to kick in whenever someone submits a log; the form to submit the logs to the wiki has stuff to handle this (or will; if I can do it for CoD I can do it for this much more easily). XP for downtime scenes is a thing if they qualify for those incentives. It gives people a reason to do something in that downtime other than just chatter OOC or 'oh, well, may as well just write something sticky'.

The incentives are focused on things that are value-adds to the game in some fashion; there are additional ones for risk and events and such but these apply to absolutely any log posted•:

• The log applies to one or more game themes (checkboxes for which apply; these will be linked on that theme's info page so people can see what is going on in game related to that theme in play and how people are interpreting it)
• The log discusses events from an ongoing plot or recent PrP (add the name for either in an autofill box; it will link up that log to the plot or PrP page so people can see the ripples of the event/plot/etc. are spreading; the GM for the plot or PrP also gets a minor XP kickback for this, because not only did they create a scene, they created something that gave people something to RP about even beyond the confines of that scene; this also encourages side plots to grow from out of these logs)
• Discussion/investigation/exploration of/references to the lore/urban legends
• Is using public gridspace/hangout locations

There are a few more, though I'd need to double-check the list for the specifics (and the insomnia is winning on the clarity factor). There will also be things like a weekly legend or a monthly theme that gets an extra smidgen of a bonus, usually in the run up to something being planned around that theme. (And it's fine for players to request these if they're planning a public PrP around either or both, because then everyone involves wins, which... everybody involved wins, not seeing a downside here. )

• Yes, including NSFW content, if for some reason people want to post that. There are NSFW censor things people can use for this similar to the wiki spoiler template I posted a ways back in one of the help forums. There are a few common sense exceptions to this: no rape on the wiki, no child sex on the game period so obviously it should never be in a log, etc.

[Arkandel]

@Seraphim73 said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@surreality Sorry, I was using metaplot imprecisely. I meant 'larger stories, generally run by Staff, that tend to provide the majority of inertia to a game experience.'

There's the opposite of that, too.

"We don't allow Pure to be used in PrPs as they're reserved for the Big Staffy Metaplot".

<staff proceeds to never run a scene with or without Pure in it>

[surreality]

@Arkandel Jesus, that. All the fuck that.

I have a 'don't break the toys without permission' general standard that applies to major named NPCs flagged 'no killing off without asking plz', and things like 'do not have a major national power invade and overrun the island without consulting staff plz' -- but this is like that common sense 'don't set off a nuke on the grid and atomize everyone and everyone's everything' rule. (The named NPCs thing is because that's a toy in the box everybody's supposed to be able to share, and it sucks when somebody just goes around breaking all the toys in the room.)

You want an island whale to lurk nearby and get smote or try to hump the lighthouse? Have at. Legion of nightmare fuel looming up from the deep to kidnap random townsfolk to turn into appetizers? Go for it.

Some stuff, yes, people will have to ask. "I'm in the Spanish Armada faction so I decided to have Spain take over the island because whynot, there's a flag and everything!" isn't going to fly without cause. (See Black Sails for quite a few examples of cause, though.)

[Ghost]

@surreality said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

Yes, including NSFW content, if for some reason people want to post that. There are NSFW censor things people can use for this similar to the wiki spoiler template I posted a ways back in one of the help forums

Dude, I would totally read NSFW logs in the least creepy of ways.

I mean, work gets boring and on breaks it's nice to have logs to read, but reading some NSFW logs from other players might turn into some kind of Luke and Laura minor fan factor where the next time I see a certain two players post a NSFW log, I might be like: OMG GOTTA READ, HOLY SHIT, I HOPE THEY GOT OVER THAT WEREWOLF CHEATING EPISODE AND MADE UP!

I feel like I'm sometimes missing an entire 'high five' level of this hobby, because I'll comment on PubChan about how great X or Y log was. I totally wanna cheer on other people's RP, whatever it is. Heck, sometimes reading other people's love helps me find people I wanna RP with and I get a little bit giddy when I finally get a chance to:

Werewolf dude Steve is a fucking BADASS. I've read like...7 logs, and now my character just met Steve and they're accidental allies in the same bar right, how COOL IS THIS?!?

[surreality]

@Ghost I actually figure that if people post those they'll likely, uh, just summarize those bits or ftb that out and fade back in for content but I made the NSFW tag thing just in case.

It is literally:

{{NSFW|<block of text goes here>}} <-- and then it turns into a little collapsible section that's hidden by default with a 'NSFW content under here' sort of thing.

...if people feel like putting it up there. (I may still just reflexively siteban anybody who doesn't edit that shit if it's all written in second person, though, 'cause nnnngh. THIS IS NOT THE KIND OF LOG ENTRY WE WANT HERE NOOOO. Ahem.)

But yeah, that's kinda the thing. It's a means of giving people something to do other than just OOC chat or randomly hook up between events, mostly, and make it count and matter. Encourages people to run things that give people some IC 'homework' in some ways as well, past the scene itself. Adds to the world.

It's sort of a carrot toward the 'teach a bunch of typists to fish' vs. 'give a bunch of typists a fish' approach. The game needs both but I don't see enough encouragement of the former and that's something I want to work on. Sometimes, really neat things evolve out of what begins as a casual scene that lead to very intense plot-story-etc. People just have to get out there and do stuff a little to even give that a chance to occur organically. Incentivizing 'get your butts on grid and do stuff!' will hopefully help enable that.

[Roz]

I've staffed on and played on games where people just posted their NSFW work as a matter of course. All the logs were posted, pretty much. We had a warning box in the log form where people could indicate stuff. I dunno man, we're all adults, and they were games with a log-posting culture. @surreality, you've spoken firmly and often on this forum about how awful the slut-shaming culture surrounding TS has been in the MU* community in the past and how much better it is. And I totally don't think that's what you're doing in this instance, but I also don't think an attitude of "well if people did want to post for some reason, not that I understand why they would want to" necessarily serves to help normalize the whole thing. If that makes sense. Not arguing that you shouldn't have tags/collapsible boxes for NSFW content, because some people would rather skip reading it, or they might be in a place where they don't want to have NSFW content on their screen or whatever, but I admit the attitude of "it's totally cool if people wanna get their RP freak on, but it's kind of weird that they'd ever post it" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

[Meg]

Some of my best posted logs have involved TS on those same games. Idgaf. They were /good/, and I was proud to share them.

[Ghost]

@Roz said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

but I admit the attitude of "it's totally cool if people wanna get their RP freak on, but it's kind of weird that they'd ever post it" doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Agreed. I like to think, in theory, that nothing ever happens on the game that should be kept OOCly secret. Not that I'd ever mandate NSFW RP is required to be posted, but simply I'd like to think it's all part of the story, and if the story involves NSFW content, it's really no different than any other log.

Then again, I don't care about posting NSFW content because any bit of RP I do isn't personal to me on an OOC level. It's a story about characters and team-based creative writing.

Constructively? I think a lot of people don't post NSFW content logs for the following reasons (again ghost wit the lists...)

• Potential weird feelings of OOC exposure, like there's something OOC personal about the scene, or perhaps they don't want an internet footprint trail going back to RP either of the players' significant others might get upset about (cyber cheating?)
• The potential assumption of being judged on the quality of content
• The potential assumption that it'll be accepted as creepy, or that it'll draw in creepers searching to get in on the TS?
• Avoiding the TS/slut shaming culture altogether.

As far as I'm concerned, people should post what they RP. The good the bad, the ugly, the sexy. We're all the same kind of nerd, here, and I think we can all agree that NSFW is fun.