Space Lords and Ladies

[deadculture]

@Apollonius This fixation on punishing 'TS Whores' (one of which I unabashedly am if I lack anything better to do) is where you start to go wrong. Fading Suns is a shitty setting overall for a MU because it assumes everyone in a group will play nice together. MUs and particularly FS MUs, have been proving that people will not cooperate if there's the slightest amount of conflict. You need only refer to the way Amber acted on Star Crusade if it didn't go her way, OOCly. She'd avoid RPing with the person the most she can.

[bored]

@Apollonius said:

I'm hijacking Packrat's thread because I know he wants a more stable political game but at the end of the day, I feel like any and all Lord and Ladies game will fight the trend of becoming a marriage simulator. It is staff's vision and drive to keep those forces away. Or blow up said weddings.

Maybe you should stop? I mean, your first post was framed as advice for MUs, but you've answered replies to it with 'this is just what I want to do in my own TT-like thing an fuck MUs.' Which is fine, but if you're just here to derail that's kind of being a dick?

[Crysta]

All my current haunts are now tournaments and tea parties and I would literally play the shit out of anything else.

[Apollonius]

@bored Let me rephrase. I feel like I am hijacking Packrat's board and I was already planning on easing off. That was self-deprecation. You could stop acting like every thing I do is an attempt to be a dick. It's getting kinda fucking old. This is why I hated interacting with you in Star Crusade and why I've given up on trying to hold a meaningful conversation with you here.

@deadculture I mention TS only because it is such a predominant theme for marriage simulators. I have nothing particularly against TS necessarily if it is part of the story and I have accepted that it is just a normal course of life. What would be nice is to enforce societal norms that do not promote free loving. A means to stamp down on marriage simulating in Lords and Ladies games.

The Amber example is pretty problematic. A flatter regime with unstable executive level positions would mean that someone intentionally avoiding someone else OOC will translate to avoiding someone IC. That should have a strongly negative effect on the game. The problem with Star Crusade was that the staff regime insulated Amber from those negative ramifications. Again, I think that creating a thematic society that allows the players to run their lives without

I'm out of recommendations and ideas. I can distill my points to two recommendations for @Packrat :

1. Have an active staff with clear and transparent theme that helps facilitate RP rather than drives a story. Said staff should build in player-driven avenues of thematic control and let things move organically.

2. Players need to be allowed to see their efforts with minimal staff intervention. Instead of artificially prolonging a game and enforcing rigid 'balance' of factions, let things flow organically. Worst case scenario, players force a reboot or a rewind of the game.

gl;hf

Back to Fallout 4.

[Packrat]

So on the note of actually doing stuff, do people have thought on an RPG system to use for Space Lords & Ladies? A major criteria is that it should be something with a freely available +sheet and similar code for, or something that I can fairly easily bodge from an existing coded system.

I do still have access to Star Crusade and its codebase and am pretty sure I would get permission to steal parts, but am fairly sure I would not want to use it's system. I could certainly use it's +sheet and try to work out an alternative rolling mechanic.

[Apollonius]

Is Fate/FUDGE too generic for you, @Packrat ?

[Misadventure]

FATE wold need a whole new set of stunt trees to suit the L&L theme. Unless it was meant as a generic stats and rolling mechanism.

[Seraphim73]

@Apollonius said:

I am still bitter about 5th World because I had an amazing PC out there and the very IC mindset of the PC was more or less a banned concept (high technology mad scientist with an interest in outright destroying the planet where a major existential threat to humanity existed). Like, it wasn't even something I could talk about because it was inconceivable as a topic for any PC because the game was predicated on fighting the enemy with sharp pointy sticks and that was the only way.

I tend to subscribe to the runaway freight train model of staffing. Let things run off the cliff. No game is so sacrosanct that player decisions are trumped by staff fiat. My PC was pushing for the development of nuclear weapons and planet destroyers (both which were somehow banned technologies... against a foe that EXISTED TO MURDER YOUR SPECIES' ENTIRE EXISTENCE with no real reason why IC such weapons were not allowed against such an existential foe).

Not to totally derail the thread, but this was actually something we discussed on OOC channels (and which I admit that we as Staff did not handle all that well). What we were trying to get across was that these things had been tried, and had failed in the past, leading the military/scientific powers-that-be to look to other avenues that worked better (even if they were not generally 'final' solutions like a successful planet-killer would have been). What we as Staff -should- have done (I now see) rather than just shutting the idea down, was to explain the situation and then attempt to guide your interests in a related field that wouldn't totally /end/ the game designed to be a long-term fight against an implacable enemy.

So... to get back to the discussion at hand, be very, very clear about your theme. If your theme is, for instance, Space Knights Fighting BioEngineered Cyborgs With Knightly Weapons, be very clear about this somewhere, and let people know that that's the theme. On Fifth World, we had a few people who wanted to play a Hard Science Fiction Game, and we had a few people who wanted to play a Straight Up Fantasy Game, and it was a constant struggle to maintain the theme without introducing cognitive dissonance between the two outliers and the majority of people who were playing smack in the middle of the game's theme.

@ThatGuyThere
I often like to play the same sort of character, and while that character can still get involved in the marriage simulator--and even the political/empire-building game--I agree that the adventures/Knight Errant sort of play is the most entertaining. I think it's more a question of finding those who like the same sort of play that you do, and finding a niche to play it in (and usually a Staffer to help run those things), than of trying to change the whole genre of the game.

As several people have noted, the focus on LnL games becomes Marriage Simulators when Staff does not provide enough plot to interest the players, or when players are not empowered to run storylines of their own, or both. The best way to keep an LnL game from becoming nothing more than a Marriage Simulator (although I think that sort of by definition there will be Marriage Simulation within an LnL game) is to give people other things to do and keep those other things moving forward.

[Kanye Qwest]

@Apollonius said:

What would be nice is to enforce societal norms that do not promote free loving.

Free loving, or marriage? What are you really complaining about, here? You mention TS, which is what I would guess you mean by free loving, but then you also say you don't want characters marrying FOR LOVE.

I just ask because this "enforce societal norms' is such a red flag.

[Derp]

@Kanye-Qwest said:

I just ask because this "enforce societal norms' is such a red flag.

Myths of societal norms, maybe. Adultery, homosexuality, the breaking of gender roles... all of those things are Fact in history, with 'societal norms' mostly being the convenient myths that we created somewhere along the way to make the other things taboo. So, agreed. 'Enforcing societal norms' is kind of a red flag.

[mietze]

I don't know that you could call L&L marriage simulating "free love". Aren't they usually rather the opposite of that?

[Seraphim73]

@mietze said:

I don't know that you could call L&L marriage simulating "free love". Aren't they usually rather the opposite of that?

They're usually supposed to be the opposite of this, but there's a specific subset of players who like to get into multiple relationships on a single character, generally hiding these relationships OOCly as well as ICly.

[mietze]

Like, their PC has relationships with 13 other pcs? Or they create a bunch of alts to get involved with someone else's 1 PC?

[deadculture]

@Seraphim73 I find that can be fair, as long as the person isn't gaslighting the twelve others about being their one true love or whatever.

[bored]

How is any of this shit L&L related?

Who is fucking who drama happens on literally every MU ever and will happen on every MU ever.

[Packrat]

Pretty much, everyone fixating on fucking each other happens if you managed to get a playerbase then fail to provide anything else for them to spend their time on. I mean fucking will be happening regardless but most people stick to Shangrila if that is their only goal, it turns into the primary focus only after people fail to be kept fed with Plot.

[Apollonius]

Free Loving was short hand for Devolving Into Marriage/Relationship Simulators. Part of the discussion was how to keep Lords and Ladies in an adventuring or high political context rather than what they all eventually gravitate towards. TS happens and it happens a lot. The point I am trying to make is that there are very few controls possible to prevent a game from collapsing into a mire of marriage simulators between pretty princesses and princes. One of those happens to be IC thematic incentivization of why devolving into marriage/relationship simulators is bad.

One of the major negative factors in a game that has devolved to marriage/relationships and TS over actual plot is that these activities result in weird and negative behaviors OOC amongst different players. Add to the mix a staffer running with his or her pants down and you have a textbook recipe of a game about to teeter into collapse.

Does that clear things up?

There are those that want to explore options to limit this behavior. There are those that think that limiting this behavior is totally for naught. One option is to maintain activity levels to such an extent that the playerbase cannot invest too much time in marriage simulation because they are too busy killing each other or killing a foreign foe. Even then, staff activity can only be maintained for so long. Or once foes start fucking each other.

I'm not sure how that became grossly misconstrued for enforcing societal norm myths against adultery and homosexuality. I have no philosophical intent here other than MU* theoreticals on the behavior of players and constructing game theme. Christ.

[bored]

@Apollonius said:

The point I am trying to make is that there are very few controls possible to prevent a game from collapsing into a mire of marriage simulators between pretty princesses and princes. One of those happens to be IC thematic incentivization of why devolving into marriage/relationship simulators is bad.

No, a thousand times no.

Trying to build your game so it will punish people for the things you don't want them to do but they're definitely going to do anyway is head-to-wall level moronic. Seriously, what possible constraints are there that you can offer thematically that will discourage people from doing the main thing that humans fucking do: namely doing the fucking!

One of the major negative factors in a game that has devolved to marriage/relationships and TS over actual plot is that these activities result in weird and negative behaviors OOC amongst different players. Add to the mix a staffer running with his or her pants down and you have a textbook recipe of a game about to teeter into collapse.

You are not going to stop this, however much you try. And the fact that it happened on SC doesn't mean @Packrat should obsess about it. I mean, he probably shouldn't give his main GMPC a fancy sexdungeon, but other than that, its not a big deal.

There are those that want to explore options to limit this behavior. There are those that think that limiting this behavior is totally for naught. One option is to maintain activity levels to such an extent that the playerbase cannot invest too much time in marriage simulation because they are too busy killing each other or killing a foreign foe. Even then, staff activity can only be maintained for so long. Or once foes start fucking each other.

I think anyone who wants to explore ways to limit the behavior is going down a truly bottomless rabbit hole, and they should reconsider their life decisions (ok, just that one). It really is sufficient just to give people other interesting shit to do, and not worry too much about the fucking. The fact that there's some emphasis on the legal/societal side of fucking in L&L is really no reason to obsess about it.

[Apollonius]

Not all Lord and Ladies MU*s are doomed to become marriage simulators. People tilt towards whatever is en vogue. I'm not proposing to block out the fucking aspect in its entirety but this tendency towards pretty princesses and princes playing out their pregnancy fantasies was fairly uncommon in the past. Fading Suns Vargo only had one couple who were dead set on playing through marriage/relationship/pregnancy drama during my five odd years I was there (and that in itself is a much more convoluted web of alts fucking alts and a RL couple TSing in the game).

The proliferation of the modern L&L trope really started rearing its ugly head when Firan was no longer a viable platform for multigenerational fucking and the increasing popularity of Kushiel-themed MU*s during the absence of a viable Fading Suns or any other Lords and Ladies alternative while the hard adventuring/political players started to get crowded out of the space or adapt to changing conditions. Game of Thrones and its own sexualized version of nobility exacerbated this trend. I mean, noble etiquette used to be a nightmare to deal with because there were certain protocols demanded in the Fading Suns universe and if they were not met, you could be unwittingly committing major social faux pas that would translate to poor political play. What I am seeing today with a lot of noble-oriented games is an increased relaxation of those protocols, sometimes for the better, but often to break the often steep learning curve of playing a lords and ladies and making it easier for everyone to sleep with one another because this is easy and it is how to make a game popular.

The issue is in the players that a game attracts and which of the play styles dominate the lay of the land. Fucking, TS, and domestic drama are all a natural part of any MU* but it's really up to the theme makers in terms of the control of the variables of attracting certain players. Packrat can opt to pick a highly adventure-styled game and attract those players to swamp out the occasional ones that want to get married and have pretty children. Packrat can also opt to pick a highly political game that swamps out adventuring concepts and pretty princess and princes concepts. I stand by my point that there are variables that staff is in control of to alter the trajectory of their games by focusing on thematic elements that appeal to certain players and discouraging other players to never play at all or conform to what Rome does. The natural trajectory of any Lords and Ladies game in modern times is to rush towards a mess of marriage simulations and all sorts of domestic drama.

The question is when the carrot runs out, is there a viable stick? Maybe I'm some archaic dinosaur who is unable to fathom a world that now irrevocably and irreversibly has become a marriage simulator in any lords and ladies paradigm and the two cannot be divorced from each other. I'll concede that.

[Packrat]

Personally I am fairly confident of being able to avoid running a game with my pants around my ankles due to the fact that, frankly, I prefer such relationships to be in real life and text fucking is extraordinarily boring compared to the real thing.

What I am going to need in order for the place to succeed is other people to want to staff and for them to be willing to run stuff instead of chasing after their groins. Will that work out? Who knows! Either way I am trying to cook the books by building in IC political and economic competition and coordination from the start rather than having people just be abstractly wealthy in isolation.