I cannot think of someone I respect more than @faraday when it comes to designing MUs. Ares has consistently impressed me, and I think of her contributing more to the overall hobby in the past few years than anyone.
Faraday is so good and so accomplished at what she does that when people on Arx come to me for suggestions about getting games going, I usually point them to Ares, not our code base. I cannot overstate how good of a job she's done in making the hobby more accessible.
I can understand people being disappointed, but I'm honestly impressed they imposed a cutoff. Takes a lot of guts to do that, knowing the kind of griping it'll get. It is to their credit, and speaks to people being willing to make hard choices to keep the kind of game they want.
There's a lot of great collaborative roleplayers in the hobby. Probably more than anyone realizes. And every once in a while there's a scene where just everyone is on point, and it makes me remember why this format for roleplaying is my favorite.
@Caractus your app is like "maybe we should bring back kink shaming"
Yeah, I have aphantasia. It's interesting to me to look at the practical effects of it. Like when descing the grid for my game, almost all the room descs are extremely perfunctory descs of what the place looks like and then a long digression in lore, and it never occurred to me until recently that might be why.
Like there's an interesting conflict between people that are mindblind and others when I write a description and someone presses me for details. It feels exactly like someone telling a story, and then someone pushes them for completely extraneous things they never would have thought of. Like "what color is something" is a lot like a kid asking a parent telling a story and pressing them for details the parent hadn't thought of. "Exactly how old were the protagonist's parents, what was their birthday" -- details I'd never, ever think of because I just don't picture things so like "what color is it, how big is that, where exactly in the room is this located" never, ever occurs to me.
Funny enough, I always considered people going, "But what does this LOOK like" to be extremely anal and I just didn't care. ETA: In contrast, I actually really enjoy reading people's descs, but in RP I've been more drawn to people implying the mindset of a character, their motivations, emotional state, etc- it's much more immersive to me.
Way, way, way more people are okay with their characters dying in a cool way than they are ever okay with being made to look like an idiot, or just being wrong about something. It isn't even close. People will tolerate catastrophic losses no problem as long as it doesn't undermine how they picture their character, but if you basically ever suggest their character is less cool than they think it is, a lot of players will fight that to their dying breath, and would way rather be banned while throwing a meltdown of epic proportions than take that.
My personal take is that you should just build the environment around people that like story and get invested in it, and reward them for that behavior as much as you can, because they are the ones that generally make the environment really come to life and generate positive experiences for other people. Then you can try to create as much incentives as possible for buy in from people that aren't as invested in story, but mostly I'd be looking at how to stop them from damaging things for the much smaller first group.
Like I honestly think it's pretty simple, though simple doesn't mean easy. Just keep rewarding quiet, no drama players that gracefully deal with consequences and roll with stories. It's incredibly easy to fall into the trap of trying to appease people that are cool 95% of the time but freak out 5% of the time, particularly when they have tons of friends, but you really should just focus on the 100%'ers rather than tweak the game to accommodate 95%ers at their expense.
ETA: OOC environment is the #1 reason very chill, story focused players aren't on more games. If someone is just looking to collaborate and tell stories with other people and only invested in RP, what do you think they do when they log into the game and their first experience is seeing someone be a dipshit in an ooc room? They are gone immediately.
@carex said in Let's talk about TS.:
Can you be more specific? Why is it a horrible idea?
Why would you wish to reward someone being disruptive to the play environment with a public spectacle with which that they can further disrupt the play environment?
@downwithopp said in An Apology to BSO and BSU.:
What happened with Snowglass was unacceptable. If I made her uncomfortable
In light of how the thread developed and the numerous posts, let me just highlight that from your original post and say the answer is probably, 'it is a safe bet you did'.
I'd take from this thread that if you have an inner voice going, 'Hey would this be uncomfortable' the answer is always yes, and do not do that thing.
Everyone has a lot going in their lives. Just some people want to make sure it's everyone else's problem too. Don't try to justify or explain, really. I feel for someone that has all sorts of terrible reasons they acted out but at the end of the day, there's plenty of people MUs dealing with horrible, horrible shit in their RL that never cause problems for anyone.
Ever.
In trying to draw it back to topic, I think there's a startling lack of awareness (real or feigned), that being sex positive does not mean forcing expectations on anyone else, and that everyone determines their own comfort levels for what they want to deal with. Drawing something into a public spectacle would be disastrous for anyone that is not comfortable speaking about it, and is similar to pressuring someone in a way that's clearly not okay.
It is simple. Don't think too much about your own character. At all. Think about what the people you are going to roleplay with enjoy, and what are scenes and interactions that go towards that. If you find things you enjoy that other people enjoy, they will want to rp with you.
If you have no idea what the people around you like and dislike, then I think you should find out.
I think the baseline behavior in the hobby is pretty good, and a lot better than I expected. If you have clear guidelines for what's reasonable and a well defined culture, most people line up to it well. I wasted a whole hell of a lot of time early on trying to design around countering exceptions for bad behavior that people have just never attempted, when just saying, 'No one do X' would have been fine.
On the flip side, how well people handle conflict or loss of anything they are invested in is way, way, way worse than I expected. Like by orders of magnitude.
I started worried about trolling and bad actors, and almost never found it. But people going apeshit over setbacks from individuals that are normally 100% fine and even positive was way worse than I ever anticipated.
It's not exactly coincidental that the most problematic members of the community gravitate towards new players that are unclear on what is and what isn't permitted behavior in the community, and are a large reason why games that don't have strict enforcement have such high churn rates with new players.
So my opinion on this changed a good bit while running Arx. I think @Ghost and others feel that game runners are disingenuous when we say we don't feel in competition because people mostly just play one main game so clearly we must be competing for players. But that misunderstands how a ton of people play games, especially the people that just have one game at one time.
So MUSHes, as we all know, are all about storytelling. But people's engagement, what they are excited about, these are all cyclical- they go in periods where they are excited about it, where they burn out, where they need a change of pace, where they get excited about doing another story. Most games that don't account for that even have a life cycle themselves where they have new stories people get excited about, but don't deviate from that so people's interest wanders.
What happens with more games I find is people are just more likely to stick in the hobby and eventually return to one game or another as their interest waxes and wanes. This definitely is not true for everyone, but it's true for a lot of people. What more games are doing is usually not stealing players from one another, but giving them a place to get over burnout and stay in the hobby.
The common people of Arvum wouldn't really call the last thousand years a 'golden age'. Since the founding of the Compact of Arvum, the five great noble houses of the realm have schemed and warred against one another, locked in a millennium-old struggle for dominance kept only in check by the occasional powerful monarch. But even as the fragile peace frays with the latest dynastic crisis, creating courtly intrigues in the capital city of Arx, ancient foes that took mankind to the brink of extinction a thousand years ago stir once more.
Currently in closed alpha, Arx is a low-fantasy, original theme game, built from evennia to create a heavily coded mush/RPI hybrid that incorporates a lot of the ideas from both that we find to be the most fun. We like a lot of the stronger story-telling aspects of mushes, while we also like the heavily coded games ability for players to make their own fun and affect the game world without being as GM-reliant (a selling point of games like RfK, Firan, RPIs, etc). Arx will have a story driven, episodic style metaplot that changes the game world significantly over its span separated into different distinct 'Seasons' of the game's story, able to go in wildly different directions based off player actions.
Posting about this now since most of the systems are done with, and soon it'll be time to start breaking things in a spectacular fashion in a closed beta and seeing if I can drive our coders into a bleak depression with how many things need to be rewritten.
Features wise, our design philosophy has been to focus on implementing systems that promote consequential RP between characters developing organically, which ideally will in turn free up staff to focus on the metaplot and the overall story. This means there's a lot of design choices that some people will love, and a few will very sincerely tell me I'm a bad designer that should feel bad.
For example:
Fully coded and automated combat, without GM interaction. Both small scale tactical combat that can include character death, and large scale army combat as nobles can go to war with one another, conquer each others' lands, and create all sorts of problems without putting in a single request/job.
Player-controlled noble fealty system and land control with a civ-style minigame, along with organizational minigames that let players influence the political power of different groups.
Crafting system, all the player-controlled items that implies.
Gossip/Rumor system and Prestige system of player-controlled political influence.
A slew of different RP promoting systems that are similar to ones in other RP formats (play-by-post, MMOs, tumblr, etc) to encourage characters being interconnected. Character journals, changing timelines of character relationships, shared character milestones, rewards for RPing about character niches, things like that. As well as a number of minor system to encourage IC communication over ooc ones to give a more immersive, organic feel. I personally believe it's hard to overdo it on giving characters fun reasons to interact with another, while never making them feel forced or obligated to.
Alright, but what's the setting like?
Completely original world, because we wanted more freedom in storytelling. Well, 'completely' is a bit of a stretch, since there's going to be homages (shameless ripoffs) to any number of series that we love, and being low fantasy there's going to be parallels to Game of Thrones, and I'm a huge fan of Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy so there's many a homage there. But it'll be low fantasy in the sense that while magic and fantastic elements exist, they are rare/understated enough that thematically there is doubt they exist, and the emphasis of stories will fall on a more human, character-driven element.
Except aesthetically, which is an odd thing to talk about in pure-text games. Because while I respect gamers who adore historical costume pieces, I think most people would rather not be in a frock. The aesthetics for the game are closer to eastern style high fantasy ridiculousness found in games like Aion, Tera, Guild Wars 2, Archeage, Black Desert, etc. So low fantasy world, high fantasy aesthetics in the medieval stasis trope.
To the brave and extremely curious that want to glance at the lore, you can look at our painfully basic webpage that exists as awkward testimony that none of us are the least bit proficient in CSS here. That will be completely redone before we launch.
If anyone has any questions, I'll be happy to ramble on endlessly about the up and coming game.
Any game owner has to choose whether they want to obscure any information on their setting for story purposes, knowing full well that if they do so, they will be accused of favoritism and stuff like that down the road. You just will. If players try to do something and don't understand why it doesn't work, and if explaining it would cause gigantic reveals that spoil major plotlines, there's just no option but to sit there and have a ton of people talk about how bad and unfair you are. And if you have a completely transparent game, where everyone knows everything about the setting, you really lose a core appeal that is the heart of why some people (by no means all), play these games. Staff just have to decide if they want a living, more full fleshed world that has things to discover, and are willing to take some really unfair punches for it.
Like let me give an example.
Say someone creates a setting that is set on earth, and is seemingly post apocalyptic with very limited information about why. A deliberately obscured past, history eradicated, that kind of thing, with players starting to piece together what happened. Some find out that the few cities they are left in might have been part of an intergalatic empire, though they just don't have anything like interstellar space travel yet.
Now, some players are really captivated by the mystery of this and are chasing down storylines about it. Some REALLY want the achievement of their characters being admired by the first ones to do interstellar travel again, and are super hungry about that. What they don't know is that ships are not the limiting factor here, because of the Giant Angry Space Slug that eats anything that tries to go past Jupiter, or the Impenetrable Ring of Space Fortresses created by the alien civilization that reduced mankind back to earth that destroy anything leaving the solar system, vaporizing anything that comes close.
So players that REALLY want the achievement of getting interstellar travel ask, 'So will we be able to leave the solar system soon?' and as staff you say, 'That's likely not happening anytime soon'. They grouse but they don't touch it.
Meanwhile, the players super wrapped up in story, find out about abandoned moon bases, and want to check out the moon base, and build a rocket to do it. Just to the moon and back, so this won't go by the Giant Angry Space Slug, and this definitely won't go by Ring of Space Fortresses. Just to the moon.
The latter category of players will freak the fuck out. They will say up and down how mean and unfair staff is, and how ridiculous it is that group A is building a rocket to go the moon, when they were very clearly told by staff that interstellar travel wasn't happening anytime soon. Months of complaints on discord, constant whispers about staff can't be trusted, etc, etc.
A lot of people are like, 'well why didn't you just let people build a rocket and die to the space slug, or correct this', and that's really missing the point. Those people definitely aren't going to be any happier if their characters die. They are after the achievement and admiration of their peers. Being a warning to others is a thing they hate way way way more than staff bias, and they would call it mean staff anyways if their characters died. The whole reason they asked oocly if it was possible was to avoid looking bad by trying and failing.
And it's annoying but it doesn't matter. The people that are invested in story will appreciate it, and going full transparent to appease a group of people that just don't enjoy games the same way just makes for games that don't take any risks to entertain people that deserve it. I think staff just has to be willing to deal with people that gripe that don't engage in the same way.
@faraday said in How to Change MUing:
@Rook Thanks but don't overestimate its success. There have been a number of people who got bored and quit because they're looking for something the game doesn't offer. And despite being a success by my standards, we can't hold a candle to somewhere like Arx in terms of logins (which many people use as a barometer of success). Narrow focus has both pros and cons.
Dude screw anyone that doesn't hold your game up as a success and just looks at numbers, pure numbers as a metric is really dumb. I would be ecstatic with 30 active players because then I could do completely hands on scenes all the time for each person active, as is I'm pretty much just an administrator that does some big sweeping stories now and then and throws out hooks as I can. Similarly it's legit impossible for me to devote the time I want to all the things I want, it just can't happen, and that's a gigantic advantage of a game with a more narrow focus. So I'm really flattered whenever anyone points to Arx as a success but they really really need to remember the advantages of a smaller game and what make their success so compelling.
I dunno man, I think the vast majority of people just can't play themes like that well. Any kind of character with flaws that invite antagonism really has to be played like a potential antagonist, and assuming you have a collaborative game, that requires embracing an extremely collaborative mindset to avoid issues.
Every character like that, any time they give a line that can provoke conflict, it really should be done with the mindset of, 'What does this let the other PCs do?' Does it let them react in a way they find fun or entertaining, or build a solid story? What kind of scene are they hoping to have? What are the other players looking for from the RP? Would the antagonism from the character be completely contrary to the existing scene, and limit their options? Can you reconcile the differing comfort levels of each of the players involved in the scene?
If a player can't answer those kind of questions, and the game is not a PVP centric game, they should not be playing those characters. And let's be real, the number of players that would even think in those terms is pretty small, and most people just wanna play an obnoxious trope, stir up some trouble for their own fun, and give zero fucks about how annoying or upsetting it is for everyone else.
@peasoupling said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
I dreamed I joined a game where staff assigned you a character from a roster based on the outcome of a personality test. All the characters were dogs.
I feel like this is somehow Arx-related.
Can confirm, would run a pugmire MU.