Kushiel's Debut

[Echx]

Liana and I spent quite a while deciding Things about the wedding. Let's face it, weddings are about the single most boring Big Group Scene setup that exists. GRRM offered some helpful suggestions but since there was already a poisoning at the last big Royal party, that was out. A Dothraki wedding could have been entertaining but isn't really thematic for d'Angelines. In the end, we settled on something a bit more... hmm... Disney.

Parliament is set for Wednesday night and sadly will suffer from some of the same general sorts of issues, though it's more interesting if you get a good seat. (There are rules for Parliament about when you can pose openly, so most of the conversation happens via tabletalk.) However, it is an excellent excuse to go and meet some people and to get in on some quiet politicking, in this case about the war we're about to throw.

For anyone who is paying really close attention, we're planning to invade and liberate the recently conquered Flatlands. It's roughly the equivalent of France marching into Germany to free it from the martial and religious oppression of Crusader Russia. In the fall. Possibly through the winter. I realize this sounds like a terrible idea. Skaldia and I went back and forth on the timing for a while and decided that the IC consequences of the timing were better to deal with and easier to gloss over than waiting for a better season (like late spring early summer) because probably the player base of a game like Kushiel's Debut would not be able to sustain interest in Impending War for six more months RL.

Sunny isn't the only one looking for people. There are XP bonuses being offered for nobles from several provinces, and three open Ducal seats (one of which is the rival she was talking about, and one of which is a Sovereign seat but absolutely has to be held by a female PC.) Some Balm courtesans wouldn't go amiss with the upcoming unpleasantness, either, nor would members of the perpetually lightly represented clergy, though I would strongly recommend against playing a Cassiline.

[Arkandel]

@Echx said:

Liana and I spent quite a while deciding Things about the wedding. Let's face it, weddings are about the single most boring Big Group Scene setup that exists. GRRM offered some helpful suggestions but since there was already a poisoning at the last big Royal party, that was out. A Dothraki wedding could have been entertaining but isn't really thematic for d'Angelines. In the end, we settled on something a bit more... hmm... Disney.

I laughed, then I agreed.

[HelloRaptor]

@Sunny

up there on a level with @EmmahSue in terms of ethics and brains and stuff.

She's a monster, don't let her fool you!

[Sunny]

Yeah, I am not the only one looking for people, by far. I do tend to actually shuffle people in other directions if they're going to fit better elsewhere.

As far as the Sovereign spots go, beyond just needing to be a female PC, one does have to play on the game for a bit before you can do the Sovereign thing. This applies to a few other things as well, but nothing that doesn't make sense.

It seems crazy to me that we're down to two Ducal spots. o.o Wow.

[3543thrh67]

I want to play a Duc but I think the available place(s) are in areas my alts are in.

Also.. Alyssum House and Le Blanc people would be awesome. I want a PC Dowayne, damnit.

[Hella]

Seems like I've been there already, awhile back, but got stuck in CG. Bet you can guess the name!

[3543thrh67]

@Echx Oh man. I think Corinne has burned her bridges with your char. She has the Hopeless Flirt flaw.. which totally worked against her when she met Reynard. And she is a tease and a flirt. Alas, I guess I'll have to write off the potential of getting the Ducy available in Namarre on her. Life is a game for Corinne, except the few thigns she takes serious.

[Echx]

@icanbeyourmuse - I think that would depend on what kind of bridges you were looking to build. What is the opposite of a tease and a flirt? I don't even know, but mostly Reynard is way too busy for those kinds of shenanigans, not to mention having zero interest in them.

As for getting the Duchy as Corinne... uh. I wouldn't say it's impossible, only improbable. l'Envers has Sophia, and the other Ducal house is Courcel and that is extremely unlikely to change without some really radical politicking.

[3543thrh67]

Just so it doesn't seem like I am ignoring @Echx... we switched to pages so we're not spamming here.

[Echx]

Your move, George.

[3543thrh67]

You know the pans! I am trying to recruit @Sunny into helping Cori get the position!

[Apollonius]

I am sure I'll get flak for this post but if this was a Yelp review, it's like... 2 stars.

I know war season is coming up and maybe that'll keep things interesting. There are a lot of good RPers in the game. But honest to God, there really isn't that much to do and any attempts disrupt the entropy that is closing in on KD is met with rapid staff opposition. It's like a real unfun game of Calvinball. When you don't know the rules of this particular game of Calvinball or you fail to read the minds of staff properly, you lose the game. When I say 'lose the game,' I don't mean it literally. You can't really lose on KD or a MU* in general. The effort to drive an interesting story in a collaborative environment is met with a bucket of tepid swamp water in an environment that is simultaneously rigid and capricious. No one's malicious. Just, it's hard to prognosticate what the expectations are and frustrating to be in a game where things seem to be an open ended thematic environment but it runs along very tight bands of rules.

I'm bored. Attempts to break boredom is met by staff resistance. It's a fine enough game when you play within a very narrow imagining of nobility. There is a sense of an open world of unlimited possibilities, but it's actually more of a tightly closed sandbox or MMORPG in terms of narrative funneling. And it's not like there's actually much narrative at this point. It's more theme funneling/rigidity that make a lot of PCs less independent actors in a collaborative story and more of bit players in a world that they can only control in very limited amounts.

The game's active and the above are not as much faults as differences in what people want in a MU* (I tend to be more interested in expansive and collaborative theme-building exercises). If you are interested in playing fairly vanilla Kushiel-themed PCs and like to engage in social RP that is reminiscent of Mean Girls with corsets with limited ability to affect the world around you, this is the perfect game for you.

[Misadventure]

It is possible that reading http://musoapbox.net/topic/307/game-design-as-applies-to-mu-and-sting will provide KD's staff ideas where their approach may be stifling their game unto stagnation and collapse.

[3543thrh67]

I'm not a fan of putting all the blame on staff. A lot of the players seem to like were the game is. So the resistance of staff might be due to trying not to alienate the majority of the player base. Allowing certain changes might have a bunch of the players go 'This is not what I signed up for!'

I find the staff pretty reasonable, thus far. Hence why I don't want to be all 'Staff is killing the game!'

[Misadventure]

Not my point, or anyone's point I don't think. The article talks about thinking, as a designer, what you want your players to be doing, and how to make sure they know what that is, and how to go about doing it.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@icanbeyourmuse said:

I'm not a fan of putting all the blame on staff. A lot of the players seem to like were the game is. So the resistance of staff might be due to trying not to alienate the majority of the player base. Allowing certain changes might have a bunch of the players go 'This is not what I signed up for!'

There is a sizable audience for The Game of Boyfriends (or Girlfriends, it doesn't make much difference) who will always studiously play that and not much outside it. I'm not even taking so much KD here as MU*ing as a whole. It's not an audience I'm a member of, but it exists and can be very active, even if it doesn't create an environment where much that interests me happens. I'm not sure what staff does about this, apart from making sure other stuff is happening. If they even regard it as a problem. It's a thing a lot of people want to play, and I guess I can't really Wrong Fun it too much. The most active players will have a huge part in setting game culture, whoever they are.

[Apollonius]

Right, despite a lot of turnover since I've been in the game, it is still a functionally populated game. It means staff is not outright malicious or problematic or even unreasonable. That said, a lot of the people I've seen leave are people who are interested in more hard political intrigue that is being advertised with the setting and theme.

I never said staff is killing the game. Staff is killing the game I was interested in playing. That said, with countless fantasy nobles with land games before it, it's going to eventually crawl to a halt as a marriage simulator with its current trajectory. It's sort of the running trope for these kinds of games in the same way that nWoD has their own running tropes for each sphere.

I mentioned early on some of my discontent regarding KD but didn't quite verbalize... partially because I couldn't quite put a finger on it. I think I have figured it out and I regrettably won't be staying for long. That said, I am morbidly interested in how war season plays out because war season is going to climax in the winter, and winter in Germany tends to suck.

I'm a theme builder. When there's a vagary in theme, I like to fill something in that makes it an interesting point for the collaborative story or something that fleshes out something that is critically missing. Staff seems to have an idea of what they want when something is critically missing, but decides not to share it, and when it is raised by someone to try and flesh out, we are expected to read their minds or get a response that is not frothy and full of vitriol, but not the most pleasant of responses with staff clearly displeased.

[Echx]

@Apollonius said:

That said, I am morbidly interested in how war season plays out because war season is going to climax in the winter, and winter in Germany tends to suck.

This part I can address a tiny bit. I talked to staff quite a bit about this before pulling the trigger at Parliament last week because there were two options on the table: we could go to war now and suck up the terrible suck of Winter At War In Germany (or Belgium, at least - I'm not sure how far east we will get, but still) or wait until spring IC and go then.

Waiting until spring would have had the advantages of a) being, uh, spring, and the weather being better, and would have given us time to round up more ally support and do more intelligence work etc etc etc.

It also would've meant starting the war phase of the plot in the middle/end of November and I figured there was zero chance of sustaining player interest for six real months. A lot of them are interested in the marriage simulator, but some of them are working on war stuff. Because this effectively came down to a decision between bad IC consequences and bad OOC consequences, we decided to go with the bad IC stuff, which will be sort of mitigated by the fact that waiting six real months was a worse decision.

As for the rest... I'm not sure what you've been trying to do to disrupt the entropy. Staff does have a list of things they are not interested in changing about the structure of the game, but beyond that things seem to be pretty wide open. It does require a certain level of proactivity, but in two years I've never seen this staff opposition you mention. That might be because I'm working a different angle than you were looking at, but c'mon. In the last two weeks I scored a dozen war elephants and declared war on Faux Russia.

[Sunny]

Gotta admit I'm entirely baffled by this. Can you provide some examples of the stasis you're referring to? What sorts of efforts were squashed? There are a couple of hard lines (tech advancement, world exploration, staff controlled monarchy) that they're very open about, but other than that I have not seen any examples of staff crushing things. I've been encouraged in all of the crazy shit my characters do, even if I do get eyes rolled at me occasionally.

It's not a GoT game. It's not intended to be a GoT game. It's a Kushiel game, and Kushiel is a very distinct sort of theme. It is what it says on the tin. I play two incredibly political PCs (and one that's absolutely not) and I have not had any difficulty getting engaged in this sort of RP. It helps, though, that both are very proactive about driving conversations into the political realm.

As a concrete example here, Emma worked VERY hard to advance the war agenda. She wanted to invade the Flatlands, knew it was on the table, and chased people around to discuss the topic with them so they knew why voting yes was the thing to do. The whole Parliament vote, the whole declaration of war, the decision to invade instead of defend (this is the first time in Terre d'Ange's history where they have been the aggressor, that's a pretty big World Change right there)...that was all PC driven. Staff provided us with 'hey they've taken the Flatlands' and it just so happens that's the best angle to invade us from, and now they control nearly our entire eastern border. Some of the PCs decided that this was really, really bad, and they have been working hard for a while now to push things the way that they're going.

As a second concrete example, there's a group that's on extended-absence from the city currently pursuing plot stuff related directly to the lack of Scion powers.

There's a whole lot of player agency on this game. Staff doesn't squash much of anything that I've seen. I really am interested in hearing specific examples; if there are specific examples, I can engage with them about the topic and see what washes out.

ETA: I guess what I'm trying to say here for my example is that this whole war thing, right now? That's player-driven/initiated.

[Sunny]

I'm actually going to double-post, because there's an angle here I missed in my previous post.

The part about being a world-builder, but not being able to read staff's mind, and them having the expectation that you know what is on their mind. I think that may actually be a mixture of misunderstanding and miscommunication. There are 9 books. Many of these books cover all of the areas that they allow people to play characters from. These cultures aren't hidden, they're just in the books. I haven't read them all omg, so if I were going to play a foreigner and needed information, I'd start out with asking it, rather than trying to establish it.

If creation of this sort is like...what you enjoy, there are several Houses still that are blank slates. You get to design them yourself, within reason.

Skaldia is blunt, straightforward, and does not pussyfoot around. He speaks directly, and more often than not when he is being interpreted as displeased, he is simply stating fact. It's dryly spoken, so people interpret it as being annoyed or whatever. I personally prefer staff that get straight to the point without dancing around the topic and wasting everyone's time.