Best posts made by Apos

@Luna said:

I've often felt unwanted. The worst thing though is 'I love RPing with you, but so and so hates you and will get super dramatic about it so I can't' Ph cool. Bad behavior rewarded. Awesome.

Missed this earlier, but as an aside, please don't trust guys that say this. Like ever. I've known several men who find it very convenient to blame other RP partners for their lack of availability when they aren't feeling it or in the mood for something else, since they figure if they just say that they alienate an RP partner they enjoy at least some of the time. Frankly, if someone is shady enough to badmouth an RP partner they keep around as an excuse to not RP with you, I would not trust them to be honest.

I know this might not help those feelings of not being wanted like the thread topic, but I have been in the position of telling a bro why this was horseshit thing to do after having to sort out drama of women that hated one another pointlessly over this very crap. "GOSH I'D LOVE TO RP WITH YOU RATHER THAN CONTINUE TS'ING THE BRAINS OUT OF THIS WOMAN BUT SHE'S JUST SO DEMANDING SO I'LL CATCH YOU LATER." 100% bullshit.

@Lithium said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

Everything devolves into wild sex romps, because sex sells. Sex and Violence.

You have a point there, but I'm still kind of an optimist about this. While sure, a lot of players will always have their sexy fun times, I still feel that a lot of people fall back on relationship RP and fooling around as just something to do because they don't have much else going on game wise, and I would feel that would be a failure on my part to provide meaningful story and an accessible metaplot. I kinda feel it's just on me and other GMs to make sure players have enough to do.

As for high vs low fantasy, there is magic in Game of Thrones, it's just very rare unless you take into account the corpses turning into zombies and babies being turned into white walkers and the dragons and the sorcerers and... well nevermind.

And you kind of hit it right there in what I was getting across by low fantasy. When someone describes the fantastic elements of Game of Thrones, "Well it's a medieval political drama but has dragons, undead zombie hordes, plant elves, giants, shadow demons, resurrection..." it wouldn't really sound low magic whatsoever, as you pointed out. But I think most fans would agree that Game of Thrones and similar settings followed the narrative approach of using fantastic elements sparingly early and gradually increasing the prevalence and significance of those elements to the story.

Which brings me back to @Glitch and the "baby with the bathwater" complaint, which I think is very valid and I definitely don't want to give the impression that Arx will be magic free. Oh god no it will not be magic free, it will be (and mostly is) coded, and it's intended to be used by players and not just NPC deus ex machina. But yeah, much like those same narratives, the metaplot is designed in a similar way to increase prevalence slowly over time, and cause a significant change in fundamental theme throughout the game's lifespan. From a game runner's perspective, I think it's a dangerous idea- we'll change theme slowly through the game, meaning some people that loved the start will hate it later, and vice versa, but I think in terms of actually telling a story and letting players go nuts with it, will be an awful lot of fun.

A better way to phrase a core thematic element of Arx would be: "What would it be like if a high fantasy world became a low fantasy one, forgot it ever was a high fantasy world, then started to change back?"

@surreality I thought a good bit about Bartle-types when doing design, which probably makes me super old too, and I thought explorers were a tricky one to please since I think it's really hard to make enough content that they wouldn't immediately use up.

I wasn't really thinking how the larger guild of Arx would appeal to explorers bartle-types, even when I wrote in a bunch of easter eggs- I just found it fun to do from a design standpoint. I kind of figured explorer types would need something meatier, so we focused on a dynamic generated/explorable outside world as an extra little mini-game.

I think most mushes could do this with softcode but it would probably be more difficult, someone would probably have to make a dozen different random types of rooms with then a few dozen random types of events happening as you find the rooms, generated automatically when a character discovers them and is then able to leave their mark in some way based off the encounters.

Yeah, it's one of our big projects in getting help files and presentation fixed up and making everything more intuitive in general, and I won't hold it against anyone that waits for us to be further down in development and the game to be more polished before diving in. I do greatly appreciate the patience and feedback of testers as they try it out, though.

@surreality said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:

@Thenomain It's the improv factor, to some extent. People have gotten out of the habit of it to some extent.

I dunno. The games I 'grew up on', there were no staff plots, or were never any I was involved in at all. I never ran out of stuff to do, or failed to have fun based on that particular lack -- if I had I wouldn't be doing this at all, still.

So a lot of this is somewhat alien to me, instinctively, I think.

That's pretty much exactly the vibe I'm used to, and I think there can be a disconnect there in so much that a lot of people are used to scheduled events and clearly defined plots they can slip into. I mean they aren't wrong, it's purely a preference thing and I can see how ooc communication for that is even more vital, it's just a bit foreign to my experience and I'm taken aback when they don't see things with clearly defined boundaries and take that to mean that plots aren't developing. So I just have to be careful to accommodate that particular style without stomping on the kind of organic things I really love.

Finally leaving alpha and heading into beta on November 1st. For purposes of my gross misuse of those terms, that pretty much means the same thing that we have been doing but now we'll also be GMing and moving the story forward. If any system we add in spectacularly explodes in a horrifying display of imbalance and regret, we'll try limit the damage as much as we can to keep a consistent play environment, but hopefully we can avoid many retcons. Systems remaining to be added in will be primarily dealing with automated coded systems for controlling domains/armies, dynamically generated exploration rooms and GM commands for players running plots in them, social combat, and agents (npc minions). And a lot more website/game integration. We'll be adding/testing most of those during beta, and aim for full release once the systems are done and the first major season/storyarc of the metaplot ties up.

I'm pretty okay with someone deciding where a roster character falls on the Kinsey scale as long as it doesn't invalidate past RP and makes sense in the overall context of the character's story. Not that big a deal to me.

@Kanye-Qwest is a better story teller than me, and frankly better with people. That might be hard for you to swallow, but it's the truth. I get lost in minutiae, and she has a far better macro perspective- and she can recognize that talking some assholes down from ledges is a mistake, if they are toxic to the game environment and just not a net contribution to the game.

I feel like your compliments of me are disingenuous, and are only said in a backhanded insult towards her. Arx would not survive without her, and I kindly ask you to stop. And if your only interest in the game is to try pick at someone you have a personal beef with because she's embarrassed you here, then please do not play.

@botulism When it comes to effort and overcoming adversity in pretendy fun times, most people buckle like a belt.

@faraday said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

@seraphim73 said in Big city grids - likes and dislikes:

if you can't just walk into the room, and have to "teleport" in, it feels more private, and there's a barrier to entry. I think that our hobby would be better off with more scene code if we could get past this, but I don't know how to get past it.

Sometimes I feel like this is a no-win situation. If there's RP on the grid, some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. If there's RP in a scene room - even if it's got (OPEN) emblazoned all over it - some people are tentative about joining without an invitation. This is a people problem, not a tools problem, and I don't know how to get past it either. Maybe we can't, and just need to look at the other pros/cons and call the comfort zone/invitation problem a wash.

When it comes to the feel of commands and immersion I think it is incredibly difficult to get it right. A single word choice in the output of functionally identical commands will make it popular or dead.

Most of these people can be a little snippy over, but it's not a big deal. it's just a little nudge and most reasonable people are able to go with the flow. That's not usually what causes the big blowups, though.

What happens though is these little debates become proxies for real huge fights. Like the 'Gravball has 5 man teams' isn't really because someone is passionately dedicated to the idea of 5 man teams or bigger teams, but because Frank just showed up and would be a 6th, and Bob hates Frank's guts, and really doesn't want frank there, so he tells Frank to learn theme and get the hell out. Or because Chad was just shot in the face, and then spends 4 hours debating ballistics to show why, no sir, it would be impossible for him to be shot in the face. It's not because Chad is mortally offended by the audacity of someone to handwave ballistics, but because he really would rather not be shot in the face. This also comes up hardcore when a setting wants to avoid a problematic element and someone's like, 'THAT IS UNREALISTIC' when they really mean, 'hey, fuck you man, #thatsmyfetish'. The issue is usually really not realism vs pedantry, so much as the really uncomplimentary truths underlying it.

@mietze Yeah but if it's by degree. If you you have 300 active players that have logged in the past 30 days, and 250 put in jobs about something , and of that like 125 show up to plots about the responses to those jobs, I don't think it's unreasonable if like staff figure that the 50 that never respond aren't interested imo.

I don't know the folks on KD, don't have anything against them, but I'll just say I'll always feel the purpose of staff alt characters should be to create story for other people. I think unless you are willing to always make the spotlight on someone else and enjoy telling stories that way, staffing will always end with disappointment for someone. They can be important and fun supporting characters, but they must be supporting characters. This isn't really about KD at all, and I mean them no disrespect, but it seems to be a common problem in MUs in general.

I kinda hate weighing in at length on this because it's easy for people to be rude and insult the work someone has put into a system by denigrating it. So I want to emphasize that while people can subjectively prefer one thing, I think there needs to be a lot of courtesy while expressing any kind of value judgments.

Like I don't think there is anything at all wrong with going with a very minimalist, RP purist approach with a laser focus on story, and feeling that anything besides that is a distraction. I disagree with it, but I don't think it's wrong, just different.

I feel that I can try to accommodate things I personally have no interest in without it disrupting or devaluing the things I do enjoy, but someone that doesn't want to do that is not wrong, they should not feel obligated to try to do that.

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

@rizbunz Being supportive of players is very important, for sure. I don't like to be downer either, but I think pink-tinted goggles haven't ever helped a game before, so I thought I might share my experiences.

Players will not ever not be players. If you think like this, you'll be prepared for the worst, and pleasantly surprised when The One surprises you.

A lot of people on MUs play Who-Cares-More chicken, with players or staff driving a Work And Investment car at one another and seeing who will actually do more work and make things more fun, and the person that does that gets screwed when the other person inevitably abandons it or treats it carelessly.

@three-eyed-crow Even though we have the mudconnector or mudstats, having a sticky'd post on the Ad forum just listing active games run by board members on here might not be awful, since it's probably games more relevant to what people here are looking for anyways than those aggregates. Might help make the ad forum more useful for the purpose you're thinking of.

I think we might be veering away from something constructive, and I think we can talk about the positions in ways that don't come across as attacks. Let me see if I can restate a couple things so I understand them, and I apologize if I don't get them quiet right.

So we want to have extremely detailed documentation and rules so that don't let new players that aren't aware of the many unspoken rules of the hobby aren't misled, and don't fall into offputting new player traps that make them have a bad first experience with the hobby and alienate them.

And we also want to avoid having extremely excessive rules that make staff members feel restricted and unable to make common sense calls, and get overburdened with detail that could limit their ability to make sound decisions. The latter is more in the spirit of this thread, since if we're going to reward people, that kind of transparency can reduce headaches in people feeling treated fairly.

And the trick is reconciling those two, does that sound right?

@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@three-eyed-crow said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@sparks said in Alternative Formats to MU:

The number of people doing forum or Google Docs RP almost certainly dwarfs the entire MUSH/MUX playerbase.

And what I find kind of amazing about this, is how ill-suited and often semi-broken for real-time, text-based RP a lot of these formats are (I've read Facebook RP, man. I have read it and shall never forget). But people muddle through because life finds a way, to quote Jurassic Park. I think part of the reason Arx is so - comparatively - explosively popular is because it's found a way to hook some of this audience into a MU-like format, which is MUCH better for this kind of RP in so many ways. Once you get players into this format, its positives for what we do become clear. It's an indication of what's possible, to me, not an anomaly (and it displays the problems of scale when you manage to tap this audience, but that's another conversation).

Yes yes yes. A lot of these formats are actually not great for RP, and that's another thing I've discovered from players who try out MU* and manage to hook in: they find it a much better platform for RP than others they were using before. Like, guys, we actually have a lot of potential to bring in a lot of new players, we just need to lower the bar a little where we can.

Yeah, I should point out I'm not like some lifelong hobbyist. Relatively speaking, I am new to MUing - at this point I've invested almost as much time into Arx as other MUs total. I come from those other formats, and I intentionally created Arx because I just think the format is better for telling really big, interconnected stories that let people weave their personal RP into a much bigger tapestry. Other formats just don't do it nearly as well.

But I think there's three really major issues, that come up time and again, even with it being imo a way better RP format than docs, forums, freeform in MMOs, messenger services, etc.

1. Technical barriers for entry. Specifically downloading clients, and then figuring out extremely complicated commands in an archaic command line that's not at all intuitive. I think Ares/Evennia and a client that's much closer to what people would expect from other games would be a world of difference. Right click, drag and drop, and the typing is pretty much all for creative writing, not archaic commands.
2. Social barriers for entry. Particularly being intimidated, with a lack of organic RP. For every really outgoing roleplayer that's a-okay with grabbing a dozen strangers and creating storylines for everyone involved, there's scores of people that are exceedingly uncomfortable with making the first move. And this is more true the more it feels like an ooc requirement. If people can just show up and RP, or have tools to do this, it is way more accessible to a new person. If we put the onus on a new player in a strange environment to reach out to strangers in order to RP, that's vastly more intimidating and difficult. Mentoring, and just a friendly, welcoming environment is really vital, and rewarding inclusive behavior.
3. Lack of satisfying alternatives. This is the one I think a lot of people would disagree with me on, but I think minigames and giving players the ability to engage in fun side projects is nearly vital. When you look at games like Firan or RPIs that have a significant amount of coded time sinks people could optionally mess with, it adds a great deal of sustainability in creating an environment where roleplayers are accessible and filling in their time between scenes. With the nature of MU being a game environment with constant up time, I really think that if players are given tools to fill in the dead time between RP scenes, the environment becomes far healthier for it, as players are more consistently available, organic RP happens way more often, and scheduling becomes a much smaller concern. There's significant drawbacks (like to the extreme of people consciously avoiding/shutting down RP because they enjoy a tool way more than RP itself), and risks there, but I think it makes games way more accessible when someone that is having a more difficult time integrating has fallbacks aside from sitting silently in a room or listening to the loudest voices in ooc chats.

@arkandel Yeah I kind of think one post and then a link to FAQs or Rant threads would be good. With some questions you expect to find in a FAQ like, 'What game system are you using?' would be fine, while, 'Why is Apos worse than Hitler?' might be frequently asked, but would probably go to the latter.