Posts made by acceleration

@Pandora

I think what they're saying is:

If A critically injures B and Doctor C isn't currently logged in, they would timelock the scene until Doctor C is logged in if:

1. A (or some other party) would take B to the doctor in the first place
2. it is feasible to take B to the doctor, e.g., they're not stuck in a bog with no cell service
3. for some reason that doctor is the only one they would take B to

If A wants to ambush B and make it look like an accident, there is usually a system in place for A to stalk B without their IC knowledge and wait to get B alone in a dark alley via a request that goes through staff. However, these kinds of jobs usually throw up red flags for the victim in a game where direct unscheduled ST attention is rare and can lead to complications.

@Kestrel said in How does a Mu* become successful?:

[...] he wants to create a self-creating, dynamic player-driven grid wherein anything you can imagine wanting would be automatically generated (and then be explorable) the moment you enter a command like, 'goto bar'. If no bar exists, the system would then simply create a bar with a randomised name/description, and other players would have a chance of finding it next time someone uses 'goto bar' as opposed to looking for that bar specifically by its new name/ID.

This sounds interesting. I'd like to hear more details. It sounds mostly like a convenience thing not too far from existing MUSH/MUX +travel systems that allow player builds. It would definitely offer flexibility, but I'm not all that sure it would appeal to explorer types.

I don't think it's particularly viable for MUSH/MUX tabletop-translated systems to do grid exploration. Exploration is really where MUDs (and maybe MOOs?) excel due to the ability to script mobs, special events and other special things. In my experience, yeah, you can map out a whole MUSH grid and know where everything is and maybe notice easter eggs, but there aren't going to be puzzles or pitfalls or random grid danger unless there's an ST, which just isn't the same. One of the most old school MUDs I played, Realms of Despair, specialized in exploration and had all sorts of interesting stuff implemented codewise: shifting mazes, death traps, boss mobs, switches hidden in the room description, etc. Of course over time there's less to explore because you've done everything already, so the only way to keep it fresh is to add new content.

@Arkandel
There are exceptions, but they're not really relevant to OP. Yes, MU*s are super niche and everything has its own culture, but RP MUDs (RPIs, mostly) have their own general corner and as a rule are 100% IC. Any construct that defines IC vs OOC areas outside of (maybe) a newbie channel wouldn't be lumped together with those. For the sake of simplicity, I'm comparing two opposite ends of the RP market. If you want to go down the spectrum, have at.

RP MUDs are 100% IC all the time. If your PC is in a certain location, they are considered to actually be in that location barring logoff time and therefore doing the OOC 'hey can I join' dance is unnecessary. This is beneficial in that it's much easier to jump in and play with people you don't know and experience a wide range of RP styles. It is also detrimental in that it's much easier to jump in and play with people you don't know and experience a wide range of RP styles.

RP MUSHes are 50/50 IC/OOC (or some variation of that percentage) and therefore it's expected by a large percentage of MUSHers that you ask before you join. I've never had anyone say 'no, you can't join this scene' unless it was an event I was late trying to get in on. MUSHers are, in my experience, pretty polite and welcoming OOCly and prioritize OOC friendliness. This may translate to pulling punches ICly or changing their IC playstyle to preserve OOC harmony. It also translates to expecting players to ask before joining scenes.

There is probably some major MUD/MUSH culture shock going on for OP right now, but really in MUSHes it's pretty much about finding who you're comfortable with. In a MUSH, embrace the clique, because cliques are basically people who have 'self-selected' (as we're apparently calling it in this thread) to play with other people who have similar comfort zones/playstyles. MUSHes have hugely varying playstyles not only MUSH to MUSH but with internal groups as well. This is something that's pretty hard to wrap your head around if you're going from RPI > RP MUSH, but don't overthink it.

@Lotherio

100% agree on the ease of chargen for RPIs. In my experience, there's also typically a cap/soft cap of how strong you can really get, and living long enough to grind will get you to par, so there aren't necessarily huge power gaps in PVP.

I don't think it necessarily means they are more willing to take risks because the initial hurdle is less painful. It's true they don't have to wait 3-4 days for staff to unbusy enough to approve an app, or really even need staff at all to stat their characters, but RP done right typically involves a certain amount of emotional investment in a character, and losing that character in any MU* setting might warrant a break regardless of what it takes to roll a new one.

IMO, RPIs/RP MUDs encourage risk taking by:

1. offering more PVE danger
2. reducing OOC communication and thereby minimizing any guilt tripping that might happen because a PC got killed, as well as minimizing any OOC manipulation attempts to get reduced consequences for any given PC
3. streamlining code so there's less opportunity to argue about fairness or accuracy of mechanics

Side tangent about wiki pages:

I'm not actually a huge fan of wiki pages for character development. I think things stated to be RP hooks on character wiki pages typically aren't actually RP hooks but rather more a resume of skills, and that they're usually used in a 'hey look how many friends my PC has and how awesome my sheet is' and a 'check out my mixtape!' capacity. I don't see them as improving the RP experience in any way. The main way they might be useful is in giving an OOC impression of who's playing and what might be a good PC to roll for a grid that's already balanced in some particular way.

@Lotherio

There are plenty of perma-death MUDs. RPIs are all perma-death and several RP-centric MUDs are also perma-death. Non-perma-death MUDs are typically considered RP-light with combat emphasis (like the IRE series and New Worlds) and probably not where OP is coming from given they seem more interested in figuring out if people on MUSHes are conflict-averse.

@ShelBeast

I'm going to suggest you think about looking into the Evennia codebase. It runs off Python, which I'm actually in the process of learning right now, and @volund actually is working on a NWOD port for his existing PennMUSH stuff (last I heard he had some RL stuff going on though) so maybe you can chat with him about it a bit for more info. (He's written up all sorts of really neat stuff for Penn but has spoken very very highly of going to the Evennia codebase.) Softcode is, apparently, pretty byzantine to deal with and coders can be hard to get and keep around, so learning a little DIY might be beneficial even if it's nothing more than figuring out how to automate certain types of jobs.

@Taika

Aiming high is good, but it sounds like you guys have an end product in mind but haven't worked through a lot of the more basic mechanics yet. This impression is based solely on skimming through this thread, so I might be wrong.

If I am not wrong:

A conflict-oriented post-apocalyptic multisphere WoDverse seems to me that it would need a number of house rules and systems in order to account for sphere balance, scavenging, crafting, building, etc., and the best you can do to streamline the process is fully automate as much as you can. Because a post-apoc game needs what I would consider more than average staff attention for RP, at least to get started (where a standard WoDverse might be able to rely more on monster of the week PRPs to keep it alive), I guess I'm wondering how you guys plan to make it all work.

IMO, the etiquette rules are typically harder to get a grasp on in MUSHes because MUDs have coded constructs to enforce the rules and are typically anti-OOC-chatting-while-playing. MUSH culture is highly dependent on who's playing the game and who you're playing the game with. Some people want minimal OOCness, on the ball posing, and are willing to get into PVP conflict. Some people don't want that at all and are likely to metapose or provide running OOC commentary. My advice is RP with different people and see who you like playing with. Unlike in a MUD construct, it's typically easier and even maybe encouraged that you avoid people whose company you don't enjoy.

@ShelBeast said in The Descent MUX:

I wouldn't take the merits away entirely. Instead they would have to be earned ICly, like status. It makes sense. Feeding Grounds implies that you have a place you can go that is your hunting ground alone. In a setting where there's just a few small scattered camps of survivors, and the like... you're not really going to have easy access to a place to call your own. Not until you carve something out of nothing for yourself, at least. Herd, even more so, because there aren't millions of people living in a city anymore. There's small clusters of 10-30. Maybe a few hundred at the upper end of things.

I've had really good experiences with post-apoc games, but they were never run as tabletop MU*s, instead having a lot of scripted downtime stuff for scavenging and crafting. Post-apoc in my experience is very resource heavy and having self-running modules for support players/actions took a huge burden off staff shoulders.

While I understand and agree with the reasoning behind making merits, well, merit-based, what's your plan for staff burnout and dealing with a playerbase larger than 10? It sounds like you guys are getting quite a bit of interest in the game from a player side, but a post-apoc game needs a lot more staff work than a standard game due to outlining setting quirks. I've seen post-apoc games die very quickly without a metaplot to hold it together. Making merits go through staff approval sounds like it's going to put extra burden on your staff.

@surreality

I'm not arguing there are crappy players out there. I just think the ST has a lot more power to change how crappy players play than anything else because they're in the position to tailor a story to deal with them.

I as a player, and as an ST, do not feel the need to continue to play with people who decide they want to spend their entire session bitching, and I also think that people who spend entire sessions bitching don't come back to scenes run by those STs, so they're sort of self-solving problems unless you're dealing with particularly masochistic individuals. If they do come back, I expect STs to be able to handle this by ejecting disruptive players from their scenes, and if they can't do that, those players are a staff problem, not an ST problem. Therefore I don't think there's any particular need to argue about those players and am not talking about them when I say 'players complain less when they have fun'. I guess I should have been clear about that point, but I don't think I'm going to be blindsided. Thanks for the concern.

I feel most players are in the game to have fun. Some people can't help complaining, and it's a perfectly decent way to blow off steam, so fair enough. However, there's a difference between bringing up issues with how a game is being run (criticism) and general bitching which accomplishes nothing. I have experienced both and been guilty of both, from both a player and an ST side. My ST side attempts to address this by encouraging direct criticism/suggestions from players after sessions. IMO, transparency is a pretty decent way to deal with this issue. Obviously these things get harder to deal with as games get bigger and there's no perfect system for dealing with it.

Okay, I'm really tired and feel like I've gotten way off track at this point, but basically: STs can be the difference between a storyline and a fetch quest chain. If you want to change player perception of negative conditions/dramatic failures, empower and encourage your STs.

Really Tired Edit: Oh yeah, encouraging things to be better from a player side is good too. I'm not knocking that and didn't mean to sound like I was, in case I did. But it's really important to handle conditions/dramatic failures from the ST side for reasons I think I already stated (or as an arbiter between PVP condition resolution, although we don't seem to be talking about PVP XP systems here yet.)

@surreality
If players are actively bitching out another player or the ST (openly or not) in the middle of a plot, something is wrong with the flow of the plot. Engaged players will be busy thinking about how to salvage the situation or turn it to their own advantage ICly if the opportunity is created correctly.

Can players be bitchy, catty assholes? Absolutely.

Do they complain less when they're having fun? Definitely.

Can they have fun even when they're failing? My answer to that is hands down, yes.

This seems to be where you and I differ, @surreality , because my experience was that an engaging storyline would keep players, well, engaged and coming back even though one or two characters might have (quite often) made terrible decisions. I did see players choose to take dramatic failures and I didn't see people bitching about the OOC choice to do so (which may have just been me with the blinders on, but I'm judging mostly by the fact that they came back for more.)

Shaping OOC attitudes is to some extent in the hands of the ST.

I absolutely think wildcard characters and characters who fuck up make things interesting. I think wildcard characters create unexpected situations for everyone that can challenge problem-solving skills and encourage lateral thinking. It's the stuff of storytelling to deal with flaws and the unexpected, and even the winnering types of players can find these types of situations interesting if they're challenged to solve it and get rewarded at the end of the process.

This is a very difficult thing to learn as an ST, and I certainly don't claim to have mastered this talent, but like I said originally, I think the missed opportunities in negative condition resolution is a ball best resolved on the ST side of the court.

In many of the types of plots I've experienced, here are the common problems with STs addressing bad outcomes:

1. Railroad plots. There are one or two set ways to solve the plot, and the ST is inflexible about handling it. Due to the way this type of plot is written, failure will result in a dead end regardless of whether it is a rolled failure or not, leaving a player no choice but to go back to square one and try another option. This is a highly frustrating type of plot from the player side, and if multiple players are involved, bitching is likely. Because it's already likely, choosing to take a dramatic failure or resolve a condition in this type of plot is basically a free, very boring beat.

2. Combat one-shots. This type of plot has mixed results for a variety of reasons. Not all PCs are created equal and not all MU*ers prepare for combat plots even when they sign up for them. Player STs often cannot see sheets of participating players in advance (and may not even know who's showing up) and therefore cannot design combat antags for them. Taking risks (dramatic failures) in these types of plots can be a bad idea, and are difficult to handle from an ST side. If you dramatically fail a clairvoyance roll, an ST has a lot of potential story to throw at that, but with a dramatic failure on a roundhouse kick, what kind of story can you throw at it? "X PC puts his weight down too soon and with a sharp horrible crack and a sudden stab of pain, he buckles to the ground, finding a gleaming white piece of metatarsal bone sticking out of a gushing red gash on his left foot. Take the leg wrack tilt." A bunch of mechanical stuff that can't really be handled within the scope of a one-shot. BUT! This can have pretty interesting ramifications on an extended plotline which if properly handled can engage the rest of the players on this plot.

3. Splitting the party. I definitely concede this is an issue with certain types of conditions, but still can be handled by a good storyteller who knows their limits and doesn't try to juggle too much at once.

Players are free to act as idiots as their characters. It's the storyteller's job to capitalize on that idiocy. Yes, there might be a few oddball players who will never use conditions properly, but I guarantee you most would if it got them an engaging story in return. (It might take them a few tries to get used to it.) The problem with 1e was that no one failed, ever. You never saw the WoD equivalent to DnD 1 unless STs stacked on several penalties, which was pretty rare in my experience. What does never seriously failing do for story arcs? It makes them pretty uninteresting. Giving a beat for dramatic failure means more players are willing to do it, and if it ends up being an uninteresting failure, that's sort of the STs fault (unless it's a no-ST scene, in which case, well.)

BlowTorch doesn't handle large amounts of data well and isn't good for MUSHing. MukLuk has weird parsing/color issues and isn't that great for MUSHing either. I like LensDroid, which isn't as popular as the other two and doesn't have as smooth scrolling as BlowTorch, but is clear and legible, doesn't crash easily, handles large amounts of text without issue, offers the standard set of colors, limited aliases and triggers and is basically an all around decent client. It's not going to handle IRE levels of coding but for an RP MU* it's definitely adequate.

@Cupcake The issue with BlowTorch's buffer may have to do with using a non-standard typing app. It works fine for me unless I'm using SwiftKey.

Rather than blaming the players, I personally think more emphasis should be put on how STs handle failure. Dramatic failures should be being treated as story opportunities, not scene enders or dead ends. Players don't ostrasize if they're having fun, and players take more risks if there is reward for doing so. A good ST needs to be able to read the mood and adjust vs boredom and OOC irritation. If you want to change how the game is played I think it needs to be from that end, unless you're talking about emphasizing PVP, in which case failure conditions and dramatic failures turn into a player trust issue.

I really like the CoD beat system for various reasons, but I think in an MU* environment a lot of the opportunities CoD creates get missed.

Primarily this has to do with condition resolution and dramatic failures.

Dramatic failures are great for a variety of reasons. I'm all for rewarding story failures, but these are highly dependent on ST style, and the reality is in 90% of the types of PRPs I see run, there is either 1) no adequate opportunity for failure or 2) dramatic failure is simply treated as a particularly bad fumble that happens and is shortly forgotten.

With condition resolution, positive conditions appear to be very easy to resolve, particularly in a low XP setting. Have a problem you need to succeed on? Go ahead and resolve that Steadfast! Problem solved, free beat for resolving it. Oh hey, did you just get another exceptional success? Rinse, repeat.

Negative ones, particularly socially or terror-inducing negative ones, are much more difficult to resolve. Player STs might not be able to see a condition sheet, so they don't know what to tailor their plots to in order to create an opportunity to resolve a negative condition (and tailored plots tend to be, well, tailored to specific characters, meaning STs running general PRPs pretty much don't bother with this at all) and players can rack up numerous conditions fairly easily if they're following the book rules of breaking point rolls. The end result is probably a sheet full of unresolveable conditions without specifically finding a situation where negative conditions can be resolved.

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum/please move it to the right one if it is in the wrong one!

I'm curious about people's experiences with antagonistic/villainous characters here. This is specifically about individual characters, not necessarily enemy groups or an antagonist plotline, though those may also apply.

1. Was it a GM/DM/ST character, or maybe a player ST character, or another PC?

2. Was it a one-off scene, or a chapter, or maybe a full story?

3. What was the most memorable thing about the character?

4. What made the experience great ICly?

5. Did anything make the experience great OOCly?

6. Do you wish anything was done differently, or feel like it could have been an improved experience?

7. Do you have anything else to say about it?

On the flip side, were there any really bad antagonistic characters you had issues with? This is for constructive purposes, not for Hog Pit purposes, so please try to frame any issues generally and with how to improve it in mind.

What if you just controlled skill dot spending with a soft cap of some sort? For CoD, if you said: "You can't spend more than 66% and 33% of dots in your primary in your secondary and tertiary skill categories," you could prevent total specialization to some extent while allowing XP to still be able to be spent on merits and attributes while still leaving some room for improvement, at least until you hit 5 dots in everything in one category.

In my ideal game, dinosaurs would have their own tier of adventures that would be designed to be super high risk/high reward and there would be an XP bonus awarded for retiring into a staff-run NPC.

@ThatGuyThere said in Alternate CoD/WoD Character Growth / XP Systems:

I have played mentor/ students scenes on both ends and while I would be find having my character ICly be a mentor for someone, any and all teaching scenes would be glossed over to the extreme because I find them eye stabbingly boring. You also mentioned a political mini-game for folks at the cap to do, that is well and good but again not something i have any interest in. I have yet to see any political play on a MUSH be above the level of office politics.

100% this. I've never played a MU* where I found the political play to be compelling. For real political play to work, I think active, invisibly observing staffers and an anti-logging atmosphere would need to be encouraged, which is somewhat anti-transparency. You would need serious hands-on staffing for politics to feel like they had any actual ramifications in a game, and depending on the scale of the game it just might not be feasible to try to do.

I definitely agree on the mentorship point, too. By the time you're at that level of XP if all the 'compelling' scenes you have to look forward to are typing out how-to-be-badass lectures, it's time to retire. I've never enjoyed 'justified spending' scenes from either end, because this is what they boil down to.

I think my main concern aside from essentially not using one third of a game system is that well-rounded characters are punished for not min-maxing. RPGs as a rule reward specializing, but is that type of highly specialized character beneficial to mass RP in a system that is already slated against use of social abilities?

Maybe some of this could be solved by requiring PCs to spend XP in ratios or something. Idk. Doesn't solve the unused system problem but might promote less overall ridiculous concepts. OTOH dictating to that extent what players can buy probably won't go over well.

@Seraphim73
Immersion works both ways in your example there, though, re: interrogation vs seduction vs anything else. Why should a player get to ignore the results of social dice if they can't ignore the results of physical interrogation?

In a system where social dice exist, accepting your PC is weak-willed and gullible because you built them that way should absolutely be a thing, and I think using FTBs and avoidance to prevent rewarding 'pornomancers' is more true to the game system than saying 'no, you can't affect me because I'm a PC'. Properly used, social dice can be handled in a manner very similar to combat dice, which is the whole point of the doors system, although I admit I haven't used doors in a PVP situation.

It's better to avoid the construct entirely (avoid balancing around social dice at all, which can't be done in WoD's system, so it would involve going to something else, like maybe FATE) or accept that social dice are going to come into play, I think, or else legitimate social chars will probably end up having very little presence on a given MU*'s grid.

For the purpose of this example, @Duntada, I'm using the torture-as-interrogation story type. I realize IRL there's argument about whether or not it's actually effective and science supports that it isn't, but I don't think it'll go away in storytelling for awhile yet.

@Lotherio

To some extent I agree, but I think players should absolutely be pushing each other to be better writers. Players should be pushing each other to RP stuff that can be responded to and not just dead end a scene, try to use correct punctuation/capitalization, and otherwise improve their writing ability. But I don't think they should be prevented from trying concepts that would otherwise exist and be effective simply because people are more willing to deal with torture than mind control.

@Warma-Sheen

The most elegantly I've seen it addressed are in RPIs, where the skill grind tends to involve the following:

1. variable rates of learning contingent on intelligence
2. a total cap of skills again contingent on intelligence
3. actual combat effectiveness detracted from by prioritizing intelligence
4. a very high death rate

Personally, I quite like the 'gain XP quickly, die quickly' model, but that's much harder to do in an RPG MUSH environment for various reasons.