Optional Realities & Project Redshift

Groth

You cannot reasonably compare the situation to judges and their family members. Judges can be impeached and censured in a variety of meaningful ways. Staff cannot, other than removing them.

Character is what is most important. And vigilance by administrators..

Note how even though Judges can be impeached and censured, they are still expected to recuse themselves from cases where there might exist appearances of impropriety. Good staff policy is about the same thing. It's extremely rare in my experience for members of staff to actually cheat but by removing obvious conflicts of interests off the table entirely you make everyone feel more comfortable.

Jaunt

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

Could you run a LotR pay-for-play game without giving the Tolkien estate/Tolkien Enterprises a cut?

Yeah, even if SOI's engine allowed it to be a commercial product (it doesn't), the licensing rights to create a for-profit Tolkien game put it beyond reasonable reach. World of Darkness and other existing IPs face the same issue.

It has to be original if it's going to be professional, in almost all cases. There is the rare exception; IRE's most recent game, Midkemia, is based on existing IP. They just happen to have so much money (from pay-to-win microtransactions) that they could afford the rights. That's not going to be the case (or the most cost effective way to create about a professional MU*) for the vast majority of us.

Ganymede

@Groth said:

Note how even though Judges can be impeached and censured, they are still expected to recuse themselves from cases where there might exist appearances of impropriety.

That's not what I was getting at. I understand this. Judges should do this voluntarily, but do so in obvious cases because their ethical code can be enforced against them. On a MU*, if staff don't follow or enforce their policies, the policy is pointless.

I've been around the block for a long time, and I don't believe any code or set of policies will make me trust staff more or less than the reputations they have.

Groth

@Ganymede said:

That's not what I was getting at. I understand this. Judges should do this voluntarily, but do so in obvious cases because their ethical code can be enforced against them. On a MU*, if staff don't follow or enforce their policies, the policy is pointless.

I've been around the block for a long time, and I don't believe any code or set of policies will make me trust staff more or less than the reputations they have.

On a MU* if Staff don't follow or enforce their policies, the policy isn't worthless. The fact the policy exists and they ignore it tells you that the staff of that game are untrustworthy which is valuable information to have, especially if you can get it before you've deeply entrenched yourself in that particular game.

In the absence of a well written policy it's very hard to tell when a staff member is being fair and when they're just making things up as they go along.

Ganymede

@Groth said:

In the absence of a well written policy it's very hard to tell when a staff member is being fair and when they're just making things up as they go along.

If you say so. I don't need a well-written policy -- or any policy -- to alert me when a staff member is unfair. All that matters is what I think is fair, not what that policy may tell me is fair.

Groth

@Ganymede said:

If you say so. I don't need a well-written policy -- or any policy -- to alert me when a staff member is unfair. All that matters is what I think is fair, not what that policy may tell me is fair.

Alight. In the case of RfK specifically, Shavalyoth founded the game after having bad experiences with Staff on other games with more loose policies and decided to make her own game with clear policies to prevent what had happened in those other games. These included things like never staffing while drunk, never spying on the players with DARK, ensuring that the NPC's play by the rules and a commitment to a restorative system of justice.

Like @jaunt Shavalyoth originally decided that staff shouldn't play PC's at all and she herself never played any PC, however beyond her coder she didn't manage to get anyone else to help out as staff as they all wanted to keep playing so she compromised. As RfK was always intended to be a fairly PvP centric game the policy was designed to make Staff PC's be non-threatening to the rest of the PCs and this was iterated on a number of times.

Overall, my experience was that her policies were very successful in building trust. Not by the sheer fact they were written down but rather by the fact she unfailingly kept true to the promises she made to the playerbase and that the people she brought on to help her agreed to do the same thing. If those policies hadn't been written down I think it would have been harder for her to build that trust and harder to ensure that the members of staff she brought in would stay true to her vision.

surreality

@Jaunt said:

@surreality said:

First, it's generally not an "I" creating a game. This may be assumed but it's worth noting it shouldn't necessarily be. I'm doing a fairly absurd amount of work putting one together now, but I am absolutely not doing it alone. (It's also worth noting that the people who are also contributing their time and energy to the project are folks I've met here for the most part, all of whom have contributed in equally important ways, from my perspective, just for the asking and some volunteered. Others provided advice and tutorials that helped get everything started.)

This is actually pretty big, and it's something that shouldn't be discounted.

That's pretty cool. I've always tended to create games, even MUSH, with a singular partner, not because I dislike working with a larger team, but because it's difficult to find folks who work at the same (crazed) pace that I do. I think that the idea of joint creation/responsibility is one of the cooler defining features of the MUSH community.

I'm pretty much in the same boat on the crazed pace. I'm just... hyper-detail-oriented to the level that most others can keep up pretty easily. (I need three more of me to document everything, I really do, just to get everything out of the brain and into an accessible format.)

The reason I say it's a fusion of both is that, after swapping in 'staff's' for I in the first statement, it tends to be the case. I wouldn't, for instance, put this much time and energy into creating a game I had no interest playing on at some point as well.

This is very true in the other genres of MU*s, too. Not always true, but very often. While it's probably a bit less of a problem with MUSHes because of their social and (usually) non-automated combat systems, I do think it causes problems in other genres (like RPIs): when administrators are also players, I have seen the two following problems eventually destroy many games:

They are more dedicated to playing than programming/designing/creating. This is probably less of an issue with MUSHes, since the content creation is more of a communal aspect of the game.

That's a problem on MUSH/MUX as well, or can be. The trick to solving either is hiring people with a sense of responsibility who won't shirk their duties.

Because they are so invested in their player characters, and they have the ability to do so, they cheat to get ahead. Cheating has always been a huge problem with MU*s, because there is an important trust-based relationship between player and admin. When that trust is destroyed, it very often ends up in an eventual player exodus, and it's really difficult to re-build.

This definitely happens in both, too -- but again, it has a lot to do with picking the right staff. One of the things I noticed on the MOO was, frankly, a lot of this. It would have been very easy for staff with certain permissions to adjust the damage rating of their weapons, tweak their stats, and so on, in ways that were entirely invisible and thus, people absolutely did it. Advancement was an 'invisible' process there, while it's typically more firmly recorded and noted in many modern MUXes. (Advancement is logged, and if what's logged doesn't match what's there, it becomes obvious enough.)

That's why staff on my games don't play PCs. We test PCs for gameplay purposes, and we observe others' play, and we GM --- but that's something that I always feel strongly about. Even the perception of cheating (even when it might not be true) can ruin the trust between players and administrators in other MU* sub-genres.

It can, and I've seen it happen. I don't think that's a good enough reason to forbid it, primarily because I refuse to allow one paranoid asshole shrieking about how 'cheating could be happening!' even when it's not ruin my experience on a game ever again. Games need staff that aren't burnt out and miserable. What they don't need are paranoid assholes. The former are essential, the latter are toxic in more ways than that. You just need to state up front how things work and be transparent about things, and allow people to make their own decision about whether to play there or not.

But, I also built tools to stop the spawning, or to freeze combat so that we could roleplay scenes together. There was automated player agency to keep players engaged, and there was the ability for scenes of nothing but roleplay, and there was the ability for the later, followed by the former.

This is something we didn't really have access to as an option; but we are talking about a game originally built in... 1993 I think?

If you use automated combat as a feature, and your game cares about roleplay, it's definitely worth it to add in tools to stop automated combat, stop spawning, so that you can engage your players with the same sort of in-depth roleplay that they'd get without those automated systems.

YES.

@surreality said:

The primary benefits I can see in the MUX approach are that a broader range of stories can be told in the same grid space, even if it takes work to provide the hooks to allow for this. It also means the players can find creative solutions at times to problems the code hasn't taken into account, and an automated system may not provide for.

True often, but I don't think it has to be true. RPIs also have dice-rolling mechanics for players to handle situations that automated code might not be able to take into account. And if GMs are good, they will be working to help players bring their plots to realization. I think that the main difference is that players get building tools on MUSHes, whereas on RPIs, players get in-character building crafts/scripts that GM Administrators support by helping those things come to realization, and player-developed plots require collaboration with a GM when something has to happen that goes beyond the player's toolset. It works very well when there is a great, active relationship between the staff and the player-base. It is obviously an annoying bottleneck for games that don't have an active staff.

The bottleneck happens in both, then, yep -- the 'I need a GM/ST!' moment is hard when folks aren't around or available.

It's probably more similar than you might imagine, though. What you describe about players needing staff aid for things that go beyond their toolset is the same -- it's the toolset itself that varies. Most WoD MUSHes lately don't allow build/create access at the player level, for instance, while other games do (or they allow one and not the other, etc.).

And that's why the big difference between the two genres goes back to philosophy, I think:
MUSHes are created more communally. There is less of a divide between staff and players.

It depends on the MUX, in part. Some do allow players to come up with plot -- not all do. It isn't a codebase-long trend, from what I've seen. (I started off on the MOO in 1996, and was on a MUX in... 1997 I think?) "Back in the day" I didn't see players with authority to run plots. I'm not sure when that shift went down to make it somewhat prevalent, but it was during the time I was hiding out on a game that just. didn't. care. (read: Shangrila) from some of the more toxic members of the MUX community. (Mostly, that 'Spider' person mentioned earlier. Long story goes here; tl;dr: she hounds a lot of people right out of the hobby, sometimes for years, sometimes permanently.)

There are also usually limits to the kind of storylines players are permitted to run, vs. what storylines only staff can run. This usually has to do with very high-powered antagonists or metaplot (the larger actions at work in the world that are staff-directed, and proceed over a very long period of time).

A number of players never get involved in plots at all. They're more there for the 'improv' aspect of character immersion.

RPIs put a lot more responsibility on their staff to create content, including content that will immerse players when they're not expecting it.
It's an important distinction, but not a massive one.

There's more pressure to do it, perhaps -- but I think there are different ways to do it, which is partly what I was getting at. WoD is an interesting example in part because it has some actual social mechanics, despite being a game designed for more intrigue-based play rather than adventure-based play. The new(ish) conditions system allows for a lot with this. (I'm biting my tongue since I'm holding back on something spoiler-y on a project or I would go on at more length about some examples of this and how it can be a factor.)

The primary difference I see between the two processes on the creation front isn't the volume of content -- it's the type of content. I find I need to provide more content when it isn't coded than when it is, either to explain the rules for how a thing works, or provide enough options and story hooks to keep going.

(There's more I would add, but... lots of work today. )

Ganymede

@Groth said:

If those policies hadn't been written down I think it would have been harder for her to build that trust and harder to ensure that the members of staff she brought in would stay true to her vision.

Even if those policies had been written down, I would not have continued to play on the game if the rules were not consistently enforced. Even in the absence of those policies, I would have continued to play on the game because of my opinion of stiffly conduct. My coming to the game had nothing to do with the staff policies at all.

I suppose, after our discussion, that if I had a point, it is that the conduct and character of your staff will speak louder than what policies are publicly listed.

Jaunt

@Ganymede said:

@Groth said:

If those policies hadn't been written down I think it would have been harder for her to build that trust and harder to ensure that the members of staff she brought in would stay true to her vision.

Even if those policies had been written down, I would not have continued to play on the game if the rules were not consistently enforced. Even in the absence of those policies, I would have continued to play on the game because of my opinion of stiffly conduct. My coming to the game had nothing to do with the staff policies at all.

I suppose, after our discussion, that if I had a point, it is that the conduct and character of your staff will speak louder than what policies are publicly listed.

I think that you're right. I also think that enforcing and encouraging strong policy helps to teach newb admins good ethics while staffing. Creating an atmosphere of accountability and ethical behavior can rub off on folks that work for/with you. New admins tend to emulate the behavior that they are taught by the veterans that lead them, and nothing says, "This is what's acceptable and this is what's not" better than having strong policy.

At least, that's where I come from. It takes following through on that policy to make it work, but I do think that it is an important inclusion.

SparklesTheClown

I forgot what it's called, but there -is- a commercial RPI out there. I wish I could remember the name, but it's pay for perks. It's one of those hardcore RPIs that doesn't even have an OOC channel, barely any means of OOC communication at all to be honest.

But as far as meaningful RP, that's the thing, in MUing we have a misconception that we're the height of RP. But I think the vast majority of RPers are like me. They'll RP in a goddamned pit of dirt and it won't be much different from being in a MU for them. If MUing didn't exist I'd still manage to find a way to roleplay long plots with lots of people and such. It's not really a MU exclusive thing.

Really, the challenge with drawing players into MUing is actually showing what the benefit of doing it would be to begin with. I guarantee that you could go to some random forum RP or IRC RP and explain MUing, and they'll say, "Well I can do that anyway, why should I care about this?"

Actually introducing MUing as an alternative that people have an incentive to actually give a shit about when they already have a means of RPing is a challenge. Being able to explain what MUing is would be the first hump. It's very difficult to explain what it is to people who haven't done it before, and it's extra difficult to get people to invest in writing a long ass app and learning the different commands and stuff. I would focus on learning how to do an elevator pitch for particular MUs for people who have never even heard of the hobby.

A lot of people have the misconception that people left the hobby to go play MMOs. But the truth is that there's a massive well of people doing text based roleplay, it's extremely common and always has been. They're absolutely everywhere. The only reason MUs aren't full of these people are two reasons:

They have no idea that these things even exist because, again, we only advertise within our own community. We barely take advantage of social media or anything, like so many non-MU roleplays do, we're pretty much invisible as a community. We're not dead, we're invisible.
Creating MUs is extremely difficult. Anyone can start up a chatroom, create a forum, start some RP Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook group. But the entry to creating a MU is absolutely massive and requires either knowing a coder, having the patience to learn how to create one, paying for space, and a bunch of other stuff.

As long as MUs are difficult for most people to create, and as long as we have the attitude that they shouldn't become any easier and that everyone should be willing to sit down and learn all of these things, then we're going to remain behind the times. If there was some super easy plug and play way to get MUs up and running, I guarantee it would absolutely dwarf the current community in size.

The concept of our community isn't behind the times, dead, or outdated or whatever. It's simply entirely inaccessible. If we were a pie chart we'd probably be like the 2% of internet text role-players who inexplicably put up with limited options rather than go out there and just put together whatever RP idea comes to mind, then just invite people to it. You can't do that here without a huge buy-in.

There's no point in fixing our visibility issues until we fix the cost of entry for future creators. And when we do that, there will be more options for future players, who are likely only not MUing because there's really not much variety at all. Somewhere out there is a creator with a dream of creating an Aliens vs. Terminator MU, even though they've never heard of MUing, and it's not going to happen because they feel intimidated by all of the honestly unnecessary coding effort that goes into creating one.

How do we address these issues? I have no idea. But I would say that rather than dead, these are what our community's actual issues are. There are simply easier ways to have text-based role-play than MUing. Make MUing easier and you solve the basic problem.

Now I'm going to go watch Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Groth

@surreality said:

There are also usually limits to the kind of storylines players are permitted to run, vs. what storylines only staff can run. This usually has to do with very high-powered antagonists or metaplot (the larger actions at work in the world that are staff-directed, and proceed over a very long period of time).

A number of players never get involved in plots at all. They're more there for the 'improv' aspect of character immersion.

The hard part for MUSH's in my experience has always been the question of world coherency. How do you ensure that all the players feel like they're taking part of the same world even though they all play at different times and with different people?

Some MUSH's like the Exalted MUSH have traditionally taken the approach that they don't particularly worry about it, letting players run almost any plot they want and hand-waving most inconsistencies. Other MUSHes like RfK put a high priority on consistency and sharply limit what sort of plots can be run without the involvement of Staff. I've yet to come across a great solution to give players wide freedoms while making sure that the world stays coherent.

@HelloProject said:

Really, the challenge with drawing players into MUing is actually showing what the benefit of doing it would be to begin with. I guarantee that you could go to some random forum RP or IRC RP and explain MUing, and they'll say, "Well I can do that anyway, why should I care about this?"

MUSH RP is essentially IRC RP with better built-in support for character descriptions, room navigations, room descriptions etc etc. I'm not aware of any IRC based RP communities of significant size however. Things like IRC/Skype is used more for online TT style roleplay which has all sorts of peculiarities of its own.

surreality

@Groth said:

@surreality said:

There are also usually limits to the kind of storylines players are permitted to run, vs. what storylines only staff can run. This usually has to do with very high-powered antagonists or metaplot (the larger actions at work in the world that are staff-directed, and proceed over a very long period of time).

A number of players never get involved in plots at all. They're more there for the 'improv' aspect of character immersion.

The hard part for MUSH's in my experience has always been the question of world coherency. How do you ensure that all the players feel like they're taking part of the same world even though they all play at different times and with different people?

Some MUSH's like the Exalted MUSH have traditionally taken the approach that they don't particularly worry about it, letting players run almost any plot they want and hand-waving most inconsistencies. Other MUSHes like RfK put a high priority on consistency and sharply limit what sort of plots can be run without the involvement of Staff. I've yet to come across a great solution to give players wide freedoms while making sure that the world stays coherent.

I'm more in the 'strict limits on what can be run' camp, but that's also because it works for the kind of game I'm presently building. You also have to provide creative tools for players to work within those limits, and provide solid examples they can either emulate or compare and contrast with. Most games I've been on, if they allow PrPs, strictly limit what can be run without staff oversight or approval.

Those strict limits also need to apply across the board for any of this to be relevant -- to building policy, background policy, character types allowed, it may mean certain merits are not in play or must be redefined, and so on. I'm building a game in a small town rural setting, for instance. There will be no Hollywood starlets or skyscrapers or gleaming castle-mansions and megayachts there, because they make precisely zero sense in the setting and it will be a cold day in hell before any of them are approved for the grid.

It's a bigger thing than just restricting potential plots to accomplish 'coherent setting'.

SparklesTheClown

@Groth Tabletop style RP is generally how people in -our- community use things like that. But at large almost every single social media or messenger platform is used to RP in much the same way that we RP in MUs. That's why it would be fairly easy to bring in new players, but there has to be things that they actually -want- to play.

Why do you think there are so many people in WoD MUs? It's because it's generally well-supported. All they have to do is join, no one has to worry about making one. And I've met a ton of people whose first and only MU was The Reach.

Logically speaking, if people who have different RP interests could all easily create a MU, the community would very quickly expand. But ultimately we only appeal to the niches that people who know how to create a MU* choose to execute. We appeal to -so- few niches that there's absolutely no way we could possibly draw a lot of people into the community while it's so difficult to create MUs.

Ganymede

@Jaunt said:

I also think that enforcing and encouraging strong policy helps to teach newb admins good ethics while staffing. Creating an atmosphere of accountability and ethical behavior can rub off on folks that work for/with you. New admins tend to emulate the behavior that they are taught by the veterans that lead them, and nothing says, "This is what's acceptable and this is what's not" better than having strong policy.

I have had the privilege of staffing with very good people. I did not have to tell or teach them much. Few of the staff under me have ever been accused of being unethical.

It starts with who you ask to join. New or old, the character of the person is what will make or break their careers as staffers. If staff put half of their time and energy into that instead of into the creation of labyrinthine, scarcely-enforced policies, we'd all be saved a lot of headaches.

Jaunt

@Ganymede

I don't disagree with the importance of what you're saying. I just think you can go a step further. I also don't think policies need to be labyrinthine.

"You cannot play PCs" is pretty straight-forward. It might be a bit of a blunt solution, but it definitely works.

There are certainly other ways to go about it as well.

Thenomain

@Ganymede

Second to Brus' Five Pillars of Staffing, I have enjoyed Eldritch's ethical guidelines, which are essentially "we are here to game, not to babysit you, so we won't."

I like the Five Pillars, because they are high level not to devolve the entire process into petty minutiae, as what tends to happen when people are more concerned with enforcing rules than using the rules to enable gameplay.

Jaunt

@Thenomain said:

as what tends to happen when people are more concerned with enforcing rules than using the rules to enable gameplay.

Yep. It's one of the big reasons that I'm opposed to over-policing "theme" and other peoples' roleplay. Micro-managing players is a slippery slope to No-Fun-for-Anyone Town.

Policy should create options for players and not reduce options for players. That can also mean making sure that staff aren't playing the leadership characters in a game, so that players can drive that bus themselves.

It can mean a whole lot of things.

Ganymede

@Jaunt said:

"You cannot play PCs" is pretty straight-forward. It might be a bit of a blunt solution, but it definitely works.

It is a blunt solution, and, as demonstrated, it has the unintended consequence of making it extremely difficult to find willing, knowledgeable staff for a game.

If you hire well, however, you won't need such guidelines because you won't need to worry about staff making bad calls.

TNP

@Thenomain said:

I like the Five Pillars, because they are high level not to devolve the entire process into petty minutiae, as what tends to happen when people are more concerned with enforcing rules than using the rules to enable gameplay.

You should post them. I don't remember what they are and they're not on this site yet.

Three-Eyed Crow

@TNP
This. I vaguely remember them, and it was a great essay, but it's now sadly lost to the mists.

Or just lost to the awful search function on this forum, if it was posted here again at some point.