Tools, and not just Beiber.

Auspice

Personally, I RP less on games without an OOC Room. I feel isolated and I find it hard to integrate and get to know people. I am very much not a 'wander around until I bump into someone!' type of person. I get lost on grids super easily.

Part of why I never got into Firan and why it took me ages to get into WoD is that both felt hostile. Firan had this massive grid and no OOC rooms. I never felt like I could fit in. It was sterile, in a sense. I felt isolated and alone and like I knew absolutely no one. I made one single friend over the course of the entire time I played there. Channels mostly involved being yelled at for daring to discuss anything that involved anything remotely IC at all, even asking about where to RP. Wandering involved getting lost or running into idle people. It was uncomfortable to the extreme. WoD games, when I very first tried them, had OOC rooms full of people who just wanted to brag about their states, idling people, or people over-sharing their RL. I couldn't 'integrate' into it at all.

When I've found games that have open-and-friendly channels (often smaller games) or OOC Rooms, I'm able to settle in, get to know people, get comfortable, and then feel more comfortable and free to ask for RP, volunteer ideas for scenes, learn about peoples' characters and offer up hooks for how we might know each other! how we might GET to know each other!

Nowadays on WoD games, I use sphere channels and all for that (the OOC Lounge is still a dangerous place $:\$ ), but tbh, I need the OOC Lounge myself.

Ganymede

@faraday said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I'm not actually opposed to muting the OOC room and forcing people to chat on channels. It's something I've considered anyway for Ares for other reasons (channel abuse tools, engaging people on the web portal, etc.). But I have zero expectation that it will encourage people to RP more. People will RP or they won't.

This is more or less true.

Frankly, though, I concur with @Lisse24 that the proliferation of OOC rooms, in my experience, coincided with the decrease of what I would call "spontaneous IC activity." To be fair, though, I am an almost-unicorn in that: (1) I usually only go online if I reasonably believe I'm able to RP with some activity and energy; and (2) when I'm online, I am almost always IC so that people can bump into me IC.

I'd rather that people think and play like I do, but I understand that my mentality is neither prevailing nor apparently common. Still, I manage to drum up RP by wandering ICly when I am able to.

Recently, not so much.

farfalla

OOC rooms confuse and frighten me.

I never played a game with them until I was many years in, and was accustomed to having private rooms to idle in. I have never gotten used to them and have ultimately left games because there was no other option. Channels are for chatting. So I don't really care if there IS an OOC room, as long as I don't have to be there.

saosmash

I hate OOC rooms. I find them spammy and overwhelming and difficult to break into. It's like being an introvert trapped in a permanent party full of people I only vaguely know.

I have no idea why channels feel so much less intrusive to me, but they really, really do.

TNP

I hate not having OOC rooms. I find all the channel chatter spammy and annoying and just turn them off permanently. If I want OOC interaction, I go to the OOC room.

Kanye Qwest

@saosmash said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I hate OOC rooms. I find them spammy and overwhelming and difficult to break into. It's like being an introvert trapped in a permanent party full of people I only vaguely know.

I have no idea why channels feel so much less intrusive to me, but they really, really do.

I don't have data on this, obviously, but if people are idling on grid and someone wanders up and poses at them, it seems like a 50/50 they might say screw it and pose back and get into an rp scene. If they are in an ooc room, there's no chance of that. Also I had really horrible experiences in ooc rooms on other games that I do not have in channels, though this might admittedly be because A. i am a staffer on mostly all the games I log in to so I am the boss of channels and B. you can leave a channel!

faraday

@kanye-qwest said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I don't have data on this, obviously, but if people are idling on grid and someone wanders up and poses at them, it seems like a 50/50 they might say screw it and pose back and get into an rp scene.

Obviously I have no hard data either, but my anecdotal experience was that it was more like 10/90. Sure it happened, but it was rare. Far more common was people ignoring you, hiding away in private places, as @farfalla said, or just not logging in at all (and thus missing out on potential community aspects).

I do agree with @Ganymede that the rise of OOC rooms and the rise of "appointment RP" were correlated, but correlation does not imply causation. For me the causation was the other way around. With more and more people doing "appointment RP", they looked for something to do while they were waiting for their appointment. Enter the OOC Room as a convenient outlet. Around that same time, many games also started reducing or even eliminating private residences, forcing people to idle elsewhere.

The benefits of channels over OOC Room are many, IMHO: You can segregate the chatter by subject so it isn't one giant free-for-all, people can tune in and out at will, you can chatter while RPing, (on Ares) you can chat from the web portal, there's a convenient history (which is good for curtailing abuse and catching up) and it's easier for staff to monitor. The down side, of course, is that channels require more work to talk on.

So I don't want to sound like I'm pro-OOC room, by any stretch. I just don't think removing them will drive RP.

surreality

@kanye-qwest I agree re: 'people may pose back' being a valid thing. There's downsides to this, too, though: if they're idling to just idle, which a lot of folks do these days, that's a grid room other people can't use without an audience, and not everybody wants one. (I find it a little creepy if I'm RPing and someone is just sitting in the room to watch and not engaging in any way.[1])

I'm more likely to grab someone from an OOC room to start a scene. In part, this is due to being burned by the approach above more times than I care to admit; approaching a totally unknown entity on grid is a crapshoot and my luck is pretty notoriously awful. I can usually get a general feel for someone if I've seen them chat a bit OOC, and let's be honest, this is also usually pretty telling re: who to avoid vs. who one's likely to get along with fairly well. Everyone has their own take on this, but I'll probably avoid someone constantly engaging in giggly-grabass, or constantly bragging about their giant stats, etc.

And yet, weirdly, I love the broadcast scenes on HorrorMU, as participant or observer. Thing is, you know that going in, and it's a group activity rather than a random stranger camping a room. You know there's an active crowd, and they're usually interacting over the public channel about what's going on, as well, with the participants.

Auspice

Before OOC Rooms happened, there was this (blessedly brief) gap in which games (at least the ones I was on) did away with the 'Public' channel or forced it to be 'for important announcements only.'

And suddenly, you had no means of interacting with people. There was no method for 'casual chatter' at all. Sure you had your 'area' or 'sphere' channel, but that was it. It became this Thing to force people to BE on Public, but also to Disallow people from 'chatting' on it beyond to just ask for RP or to announce RP. But OOC Rooms weren't a thing yet, nor were other 'chat' channels (like Sports or similar).

I took my first long break from RP around that time because I felt really isolated. I didn't know anyone save just a few people. And I've never been good, at all, at just wandering into scenes. I get really, really anxious at just wandering in. It freaks me out. Even now, with scene systems (like @faraday 's), I still page ahead and ask people and that takes a lot of psyching myself up. I very, very much prefer when I can feel comfortable and start proposing and tossing around ideas and start doing the 'Hey, I wanna RP, I'm gonna go here and do this and who wants to join me?

I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have sat in a room, even with a 'Looking for RP' flag turned on, and had someone show up to RP with me.

Arkandel

YMMV of course but I don't think intentional idling on grid accessible rooms is something that happens too much. What's more likely is if there is no OOC room (hell, even if there is) people would go idle in their own, locked apartment. The chance of anyone walking in there is pretty slim.

However I think we might be confusing the symptoms with the cause here. For example when I played on Arx it was quite easy to walk around the grid and find RP. There are other reasons for it but I can't help but think it also had something to do with a billion characters being logged on; there was almost always things happening.

In comparison a game with (say) 10 people on specifically require some sort of coordination for their activity because the chance I'll walk around and find someone else right as they are in a mood to play, or already in a RP, are far smaller. So a PrP or a pre-arranged scene for a specific time might need to do the trick there.

I'm not convinced the presence of an OOC room is that important. In my experience it's still a net negative because people hang out there when they could be looking to RP instead, but that's about it.

Lisse24

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I'm not convinced the presence of an OOC room is that important. In my experience it's still a net negative because people hang out there when they could be looking to RP instead, but that's about it.

This is about where I stand. I think it's a contributing factor, but only in as much as it reinforces a culture of hanging back OOC. I'm a little surprised that of everything in my post that's what got the attention. I think there's a lot that games can do to encourage activity beyond making changes to the OOC room that will have a larger effect - like actually giving players a reason to interact with people.

BobGoblin

Do idle rooms hinder story tellers from being able to tell stories? If a player is going to sit social they'll do it either on the game or somewhere else. But how does that hinder story telling?

Paris

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

What's more likely is if there is no OOC room (hell, even if there is) people would go idle in their own, locked apartment. The chance of anyone walking in there is pretty slim.

This was basically the case on just about every pernMUSH, along with quite a few games that let you have your own room, because there was no OOC room. It was called 'ledge-sitting' and the most notorious were 'ledge vultures'.

People are acting like the issues mentioned here are relatively new and before, sans ooc rooms, everyone was waiting in public. They were not. They were camping their ledges and their bedrooms and talking to the handful of people in their clique.

The rest of us hung out on channels and then went IC.

I don't see OOC rooms as changing much of this. If a game has a busy OOC room but an empty grid, imo, the issue is that the game is no longer engaging the players. To play the staff card (as it was by someone else earlier), I've been on plenty of games with OOC rooms and active grids, it was just that the players were into the game, and so the proportion of idlers and chatters to RPers was never out of balance.

Arkandel

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

Do idle rooms hinder story tellers from being able to tell stories? If a player is going to sit social they'll do it either on the game or somewhere else. But how does that hinder story telling?

The boogyman here is opportunity cost. The theory is that while you're just hanging out chatting OOC - i.e. when there's anything else for you to do that might keep you from being on the grid or responding to a "hey, anyone wanna RP?"-kind of request then it reduces the volume of overall RP on the game.

Although on the surface that's certainly true in practice I don't consider it a major factor.

For starters the distractions offered by an OOC room are laughably small compared to the internet as a whole; I'd be far more likely to be distracted by a Reddit post, a Netflix show or any other kind of addictive video game than a random OOC conversation on a MUSH.

For another thing as it's been noted if we're idlying them it literally doesn't matter where our characters are; if I'm not even in the same room as my computer (let alone at the window) then the opportunity to RP with me is exactly the same - zero.

BobGoblin

That's kind of what I impress too. Are OOC rooms distractions from 'active' RP? Perhaps. Are they the only distraction or even a major one? I would argue they are not. The proliferation of alternatives imo has been the greater distraction.

What it sounds like is having some sort of method of pulling attention and eyes to the screen and the availability of scenes is FAR more important. Which makes me consider the following:

What if when a Storyteller were to 'start' or 'check out' a scene it sent out the beep alert and a general 'wall' message to let players know something was going to begin. Will people ignore it still? Sure. But it makes it a lot harder to make the claim of 'I didn't know anything was going on'. Naturally, there'd need to be some sort of barrier to prevent abuse, that's a given.

Lisse24

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

Do idle rooms hinder story tellers from being able to tell stories? If a player is going to sit social they'll do it either on the game or somewhere else. But how does that hinder story telling?

The boogyman here is opportunity cost. The theory is that while you're just hanging out chatting OOC - i.e. when there's anything else for you to do that might keep you from being on the grid or responding to a "hey, anyone wanna RP?"-kind of request then it reduces the volume of overall RP on the game.

Although on the surface that's certainly true in practice I don't consider it a major factor.

For starters the distractions offered by an OOC room are laughably small compared to the internet as a whole; I'd be far more likely to be distracted by a Reddit post, a Netflix show or any other kind of addictive video game than a random OOC conversation on a MUSH.

Again, as the person who started this, I completely agree. I believe that chatty OOC Rooms might pull players away from RP and discourage wandering the grid, but they are a smaller part of a larger problem.

I really wish we were discussing ways to encourage players to pursue non-GM driven plot and creating engaging games.

The role that OOC rooms play are very minor and fixating on them isn't helpful. Whether you have them or not is very much a down-the-line decision and should be aligned with the other design decisions you've made for your game.

Arkandel

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I really wish we were discussing ways to encourage players to pursue non-GM driven plot and creating engaging games.

The tricky part here is coming up with ways to do so without offering (perhaps) purely anecdotal methods. For example anything I'm about to come up with is stuff I would like, but my circumstances aren't the same as yours or someone else's. Or, looking at it from a different point of view, I've been chatting with a friend here whose big draw to the game they are playing is that people are sane and no one is perving on them; however for me that's not something I'd pick a MUSH for, as it's not something I deal with very often.

But some methods I'd like:

A real definition of how long the scene will take. Man, I can't stay up for a 4-5 hour scene unless it's balls-to-the-walls amazing. I won't.
This is codeable (and has been in different ways): A way to tell what a scene I'm considering joining is about. Is that a meet and greet? A political conversation? A fight scene? Obviously this requires participant buy-in though to update it.
The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.
Games relying heavily on themes which involve NPCs need to provide the tools for players to portray those on the fly, consistently and reasonably. For example Werewolf needs spirits - period. There need to be specific, easy to follow guidelines and the culture in place encouraging all players to put some in play even if they're not actively STing (i.e. when their PC is already involved in that scene).
More reasons should be offered to meet with and involve other players, especially new ones. Arx did an admirable job of that and other games haven't picked up on it; from being handed XPs just for RPing with them, or with random other players, to sharing clues and learning secrets, this really helps integrate newcomers instead of having them idle then stop logging on for lack of anything to engage with.

Just some ideas for now, since you asked!

Lisse24

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

This is codeable (and has been in different ways): A way to tell what a scene I'm considering joining is about. Is that a meet and greet? A political conversation? A fight scene? Obviously this requires participant buy-in though to update it.

I've proposed in the past integrating this info in the wantrp command. So when you turn wantrp on, you add a sentence or two of the type of RP you'd be up for, and then people scanning the list have a better idea of why they might want to interact with you.

But coding it too, so that when people see RP is happening in a room they know what it's about - that would be great.

The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

Games have too mush XP period, but that's grumpy old me speaking.

Games relying heavily on themes which involve NPCs need to provide the tools for players to portray those on the fly, consistently and reasonably. For example Werewolf needs spirits - period. There need to be specific, easy to follow guidelines and the culture in place encouraging all players to put some in play even if they're not actively STing (i.e. when their PC is already involved in that scene).

I've debated having an NPC roster so that players can just grab low-level NPCs and use them for quick scenes and such.

More reasons should be offered to meet with and involve other players, especially new ones. Arx did an admirable job of that and other games haven't picked up on it; from being handed XPs just for RPing with them, or with random other players, to sharing clues and learning secrets, this really helps integrate newcomers instead of having them idle then stop logging on for lack of anything to engage with.

This, though, is the crux of game design. There needs to be a middle scene between the ST-driven scene and pure social RP. The game needs to have something for the players to do that doesn't rely on them waiting for a GM to hand them something.

It's all fine and good to say that players should be proactive, but when you give them nothing to be proactive about and no tools to be proactive with, what do you expect other than idling?

BobGoblin

Basing on the supposition that the plot modules could be pre-generated and handed out to others, or checked out by story tellers, etc.

I think a scene distribution setup of some kind might include an estimated time to run component. That would make it much easier to accommodate one. But I agree, I think a large number of scenes have no idea how long they're going to take.

I think this is the same as the first. It could be structured if action was taken that way in the design phase.

This is the real struggle, the carrots. What I find interesting is that XP is for character growth, but we often utilize it for player action. If you think about it, that's really not the goal. The question becomes what carrot can we offer to PLAYERS for PLAYER actions? Myself, I'd love to keep XP to Character Actions and some other sort of currency/carrot for Player actions. However, what that is? I don't really know, I think that's why XP becomes the default. There might be an opportunity here for some deeper delving. What would PLAYERS like versus CHARACTERS?

Yes, Yes, Yes. There's a distinct lacking of NPC data. I know on the SAGA games that went around for awhile there were pregenerated stat blocks - but that's also very cumbersome. Is some of the issues about Storytellers running things the complexity of the systems? I think we talked about that before that walking STs through things with experienced GMS as a sort of training would be good, which I agree. But if the 'conflict resolution system' is easier to manage does it entice people to do more? And if it's easier to manage it should help address this topic.

I haven't touched the Arx fad, but I'd be interested to hear more on the implementation of incorporating others. I have had a few ideas myself on how to encourage CHARACTERS to interact with new CHARACTERS. One of which is the first time a Character interacts with another one they can establish a 'bond' or some other short statement. A lot of times we see vote systems or the like to support quality of RP, I'd maybe see about shifting to a system where players signify the impact another character has had on theirs. Give a nice little chunk of character development for every new bond, a smaller chunk for updated bonds to incentivize meeting new people rather than staying with the same people? Just batting around.

Arkandel

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I've proposed in the past integrating this info in the wantrp command. So when you turn wantrp on, you add a sentence or two of the type of RP you'd be up for, and then people scanning the list have a better idea of why they might want to interact with you.

Another thing that can be offered (but with care to not violate anyone's privacy, it should be opt-in and very visibly when set) would be to check the log and timestamps of the last X poses remotely.

So let's say I take a look at +scenes and spot you're in a scene with Bob and Sue. If I can see the past 2 poses from each of you that gives me an idea on whether it's to my liking. On top of it if I notice Bob and Sue are taking 25 minutes to pose each then I can make an informed decision on if I have enough time to do anything meaningful in it.

The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

Games have too mush XP period, but that's grumpy old me speaking.

Aside from the amount I think auto-XP is almost meaningless. XP should be something to drive you into doing certain things; that's basically the crux of everything we're discussing here - ways and means to get people Out There Doing Things, yet the most classic tool in a game-runner's arsenal has been reduced to a cron job every Sunday night... for no great reason that I can see.

I've debated having an NPC roster so that players can just grab low-level NPCs and use them for quick scenes and such.

Yeah, or an easy generator on the web to create one on the fly. In my Werewolf example do you need a hostile Rank 2 spirit a party of 3 can take down? You should be able to go to a form, fill this out and it spits out the stats. Done.

It's all fine and good to say that players should be proactive, but when you give them nothing to be proactive about and no tools to be proactive with, what do you expect other than idling?

Nothing, and that's why all those countless clones-of-a-clone sandbox WoD games failed for example. Their runners for some reason thought if they just picked THE RIGHT CITY OF DARKNESS it'd work out, but it doesn't.