@Misadventure Yes. Which is something some games solve by disallowing OOC chatter or outlining clear rules, both of which mushes are not usually inclined to do. Again. A culture issue, one which you basically need an active babysitter or staff bans to solve if they get out of hand. Which is what I said in my post.
@surreality I wasn't saying it was a problem. I was saying it was a matter of different cultures. I suppose I could have made that clearer. The point is that a lot of mushes don't consider OOC chatter a problem.
@Ganymede maybe. I'm aware that most mux-in-a-box games have ooc lounges built in by design, and that's fine, but like op says, it's hard to stop ooc oversharing when there is no actual rule. As for making a rule, where do you draw the line between 'so how's it going' and the type of personal life oversharing that drives players away? How do you enforce it without a constant babysitter present? Most mu*s don't deal with problem players until they absolutely have to. I don't see a lot of staffers enjoying adding an additional arbitrary rule to their list of duties, and the ones who would enjoy it are generally not good staffers to begin with.
You can narrow down the channels for this type of communication and some games do make an effort to make it opt-in or push it outside of the gaming platform, but it's very unusual to see mushes do that. Similarly, it is unusual to see players actively asked to stop making running ooc commentary in the middle of an active scene in these types of games unless they get particularly disruptive, or the reverse but related problem of players asked not to overshare the details of their characters oocly when they should be role-playing it instead. Granted, the latter happens everywhere but some games are better at minimizing it, while other maximize it by encouraging posted logs and wiki's full of ic information.
I guess what I'm getting at is that op's complaint only seems to be recognized as a problem by certain types of games which want to encourage certain types of attitudes, and that's fine. I wouldn't complain at all if ooc lounges were removed as I use them to idle, I just think they are a byproduct and not a primary cause of the underlying problem of driving certain types of players away.
I'd find it interesting if the premise of this thread was generally accepted by mushers. Lack of an ooc gathering place is a more rp-intensive attitude. It really depends on the game in question but I've found that mushes attract players who use the game primarily for purposes of social RP so it doesn't make sense to shut down ooc social conversation. There are other little ways they discourage players who want a more ic-only atmosphere which I think may be the type of player that op would want to attract and play with, unless I'm misunderstanding. OOC lounges are more a side effect of a basic attitude toward roleplay than an attitude in and of themselves.
@Ominous Ehhhh. I'd bill it post-post-apoc but general-genre-wise it probably can be counted post-apoc. When I say post-apoc I mean direct or near-direct aftermath of the apocalypse, rising from the ashes, the apocalypse is fresh in everyone's memory and/or possibly still ongoing but has largely destroyed civilization already, etc.
Voted 'other'. Would love to see a no-holds-barred post-apocalyptic RPI with active and engaged staff. (Armageddon is not post-apoc, no matter how it bills itself.)
Maybe everything got destroyed and they released the nanite builders!
@Sab
Is there a policy on group apps?
Just to be clear, are you opening apps on Friday 6/24 or Friday 7/1?
What does it mean when you say you want to go a sandbox direction?
@icanbeyourmuse
If the issue you want to address is people not liking chargen, your chargen requirements may be too clunky and/or are encouraging people to write novels about a PC's background. Trimming it to a minimum will get characters on grid faster and RPing faster, which in turn is the best way to get people to understand the setting.
Encouraging PC turnaround ICly via not punishing death particularly hard and making death/retirement happen a lot is also a good method as it weeds out dinosaurs and gets players to feel more comfortable apping characters if they don't feel they're going to be super locked in, but that's a side tangent.
People jumping into the RP genre typically don't need help fleshing out their own characters. Roster characters succeed when they are specifically seeded to fill a position in a staff metaplot, i.e., opening up 5 slots for a special antagonist clan or something. They fail when they're pre-written characters people will look at and go 'I can execute this better my own way'.
If you want to specifically help newbies get into the game, it'd be better to sheet up starter templates and let people do the creative work themselves. E.g., stat a typical soldier, stat a typical crafter, etc.
For those looking for Shadowrun games, there is also apparently Shadowrun Denver.
Unfortunately I've found this is the case in most of the WoD games I've tried as well, and it's one of the reasons I've kind of given up on playing them. I agree with you, and basically think that what you are looking for is probably going to be best served by trying a multitude of games and keeping an eye on staff activity.
While I haven't played much Shadowrun, the game's premise is specifically set up to involve skilled mercenary criminals that do whatever it takes to get paid. That may mean sweet-talking or sneaking your way past the front door, but it also involves guns, hacking, drones with guns and bombs, punches to the face, the occasional hurled fireball and probably someone running around with duct tape a med kit when things go wrong. There's lots to work with there but it's inherently built around action. With lots of action comes a risk of death.
Meanwhile, WoD specifically has built-in emphasis on social/political interaction. In WoD mushes, this is combined with a low ST:player ratio, which reduces incidences of dice rolling for violence. When you throw that in along with MU*ers tendency to freeform RP (no PVP social roll policies being common) then the pressure and unexpected outcomes that come from bad rolls are greatly reduced.
The system itself is quite capable of being used for development of min-maxed/specialized characters, it's just that character specialization gets little opportunity to be showcased in bar scenes or the overpopulated monster-of-the-week plots that are common PRP fodder.
The WoD books are designed for tabletop (Mind's Eye Theater aside, which tbh I've never played, on top of which I've never LARPed in general), as are a lot of the systems listed in this thread. How 'crunchy' a game is is always about how the GM runs their game, which in turn is about how GMs tailor their games to their players. MU* environments don't do this well, particularly ones which don't allow sheet sharing to other players via the system and don't have any GM-specific reference notes.
With a tabletop, GMs typically have some leeway to fill in a character's background themselves, which creates a very interesting interactive dynamic. MU*ers, on the other hand, seem to prefer the idea that their backgrounds are sacred and can never be influenced in that type of manner by a GM. STs therefore will never try to do this, and playing on something in the character's past or integral to that character's personality is generally something that needs serious hand-holding or trust between GM and player to be done.
This type of thought process has generally led to WoD MU*ers playing more freeform and erring on a conservative side when it comes to letting others influence what they believe their character to be. It encourages shying away from risk taking from both ends unless the parties involved are very familiar with one another. That's a culture thing, not a system crunch thing.
All that said, a Shadowrun game without good staff will probably die faster than a WoD game without good staff, because WoD games can theoretically get by just with players.
Heard about a Shadowrun MU* from a friend a while back, haven't gotten around to trying it myself since I'm not too familiar with the system. http://www.awakenedworlds.net/
Oh, man, this is my favorite subject. I had the greatest experience with a survival horror MUD in space with aliens. It was about 30 players at a time, and the staff head religiously logged in around 7PM every night and made stuff happen.
I would not say there's a certain threshold or maximum of players to make a survival horror game viable. Instead what it needs is a really good staff:player ratio. Sandbox survival horror games don't tend to do too well.
Only semi-relevant, but I second MUSHes being unwieldy as fuck. They're so byzantine and a product that clearly came out of the past. Syntaxes for @emit and @pemit and @channel and +finger and whatever else aren't at all user friendly, but it seems like 80% of MUSHers have been MUSHing forever and are used to it so no one wants to switch to anything more usable. That's one thing IRE kind of leads in in that it has that GUI browser client (although IRE has its own set of problems in that it requires coding to play...)
IMO, people don't usually go out of their way to timelock to include another player unless the scales will be seriously tilted somehow by adding the third player via their skillset or position etc. The same is true in that I don't see a lot of passive aggressive 'You flaked out on me' unless adding Doc C would have been a game changer, or there was some underlying resentment toward Doc C already. There is an exception if A, B and C are all friends OOCly and want to wait for C to roll around so s/he can RP sweet, sweet medical godliness, which TBF is a niche area of expertise that doesn't get the sort of screen time combat primaries do.
MUSHes tend to be more about the idea of 'collaborative roleplay', and generally require a staff/ST ruling of some sort for non-social things to happen. There are a lot of reasons to ask for staff to handle antagonism which primarily come down to the idea that MUSHes don't have straight code as a replacement for mechanical rules, although if players are cool with each other OOCly they might proceed without one. MUSHers also like to ask for STs so there's some element of surprise to their stories and things don't just feel prewritten or too easy. MUSHes mostly differ from MUDs in that the level of danger tends to be set directly by character action in MUDs in addition to scripted but not necessarily predictable danger and invisible staffers. In MUSHes, you can adjust your danger level via a number of OOC means (RP preferences, who you play with, which events you attend, etc.), with events tending to be pre-scheduled and having their danger levels broadcasted in advance.
Timelocking typically takes place if:
Edit: The above ignores the 'it's 3AM and everyone needs to pass out but we haven't finished killing this horrible monster' scenario. Those get timelocked too but no one really needs that explained, do they?
In an RP MUD, timelocking to wait for another player would be considered metagaming. RPIs typically already have built-in justifications for not being logged in. A lot of things are streamlined by code, the clock is considered to be running at all times barring significant OOC disruption, and there's no reason to pretend the 8 hours that elapse between X event and Y logging in don't exist. This helps immersion by instilling OOC pressure, ironically by hand-waving the inconvenient OOC influence of real life.
All that said, despite all the difference in playstyles between MUDs and MUSHes, I've seen plenty of vitriol about both types of gameplay floating around everywhere. Lack of staff transparency can be a major issue in either type of gameplay, with accusations of favoritism, cheating, metagaming etc. having been thrown around about probably 90% of the RP options there are out there these days. There are enjoyable things about both kinds of gameplay, too. It just depends on what you like and what you're willing to get used to.
