Best posts made by Apos

Like it might sound strange coming from me, but I played systemless freeform games for way longer than I've done any kind of MU play at all. The reason I personally go with a more coded approach now is just wanting to make sure there are tools to let players create RP and drive story, and facilitate their finding RP. I definitely don't want people to feel overwhelmed, but it's a hard thing to balance since some people really do want something more like a sim (RPI style where everything is coded), versus people who feel an intense dislike to coded systems due to feeling like it's a roadblock rather than a help to just finding RP and really hate having to work through new systems.

The goal I think is to make things as intuitive and easy to use as possible, and that's a really hard, ongoing struggle that pretty much doesn't stop ever.

@bobotron The reason I pick on it is the games I played just didn't have pose order of any form (I never heard the term at all before I checked out WoD), and people just kind of politely didn't pose several times in a row, with an unspoken 2pr. I definitely don't think it's a culprit alone but I do think the environments where it is common and ones where it is not having a striking difference in pacing. I'm sure there were extremely slow posers in the other games, but I just don't remember them at all since everyone customarily wrote past them. If it's customary for people to write slow in an environment, everyone slows down, and vice versa imo.

@goldfish said in Silly things you'd been tempted to do on/for a MU*:

I'm on the East Coast. For years all my partners were on the west coast. I saw the sun come up many a morning while still posing.

Yeah, there was a time period where I often stayed up all night all the time because my favorite RP partner worked nights and could MU from her slow paced job. Maybe it was silly, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

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

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

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

@wildbaboons I had a similar eye-opening moment when during uh, some kind of Q&A session they ran on public channel, @Apos mentioned the (fairly large, though I forget the exact) # of secret orgs. With neither of my characters being in any, it was a little perception-changing.

Yes! this! I knew there was a couple. A handful maybe. Apparently there are tons and that is where a lot of plot seems to be.

Not really. Like to a large amount. Both from my experience outside of them and from what I've heard in passing from those with PCs in them.

Yeah to be honest way too much of my time is spent responding to player initiatives for me to create sweeping new storylines that would come from there, and I'd prefer if I could. It's one of those things on my to do list in order to try to wrangle things to the point where I can focus more on that, and that will probably have more of a bottom up approach (trying to seed things on lower characters and let it flow up) than top down, since I think the characters in positions of power tend to naturally get involved regardless.

So I did make an original theme game, but I did that knowing the challenges implicit in that. It's really on someone making an original theme game to create a setting that's intuitive and approachable enough, and fun and engaging enough, that people want to learn it and stick around and roleplay in it. That needs an awful lot of drive on the part of the creator since people are very protective of their limited free time, and really don't want to pour help into a project that might turn out to be vaporware, so basically it's on the designer to create something engaging, and then make something fun enough on their own that a critical mass of people enjoy it enough to learn it and then start telling their own stories and generating activity on their own.

Like to be brutally honest, theme almost doesn't matter all that much in the big scheme of things. The overwhelming majority of us have probably RP'd in a wide range of settings. The initial experience of, 'Did I have fun RP when I logged in', that's pretty much all that matters whether something catches on, and theme is just a subset of that. A game runner that's super active and tells fun stories will probably make anything work all right.

@fortydeuce Ya one thing we have eventually coming is essentially a huge GMing system to link people's goals together and nudge people together based on their character desires, what stories they are involved in, and the plot hooks they get. That sort of thing.

@faraday said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

@marsgrad said in Social 'Combat': the hill I will die on (because I took 0 things for physical combat):

Also, I don't think anyone is suggesting 'my characters has goals and personality quirks' should act like ironclad armor.

Just to be clear: Yes, I am suggesting exactly that. Some things just won't work on some people, just like you can't take out a tank with a pocketknife. Just like no matter how many points I make or how well I make them, I won't sway some people here to change their views on social combat. But those "hills to die on" should not be unlimited.

I personally am in favor of approaching unshakable convictions as points of resilience and vulnerability based on approach. For example, someone that's sheeted as Total Coward could not be compelled under any circumstances to take a risk to life or limb- they can't be manipulated, bribed, seduced or convinced in any way to doing something suicidal. But on the flip side, someone like that would pretty much autofail to resist any kind of intimidation ever. And I think most people are way more okay with playing ball with approaches that are consistent with their characters, even if the outcome to them might be detrimental in some way.

I think it just helps to take any personal strength as also a potential vulnerability, and make that implicit into the characters as a tradeoff.

@sockmonkey Deliberate obfuscation of numbers has some strong and weak points, and it is something that's existed for a long time. I've played games that didn't use any numbers at all, hiding them entirely to staff side while there was still automated systems.

Dedicated min-maxer types try REALLY hard to reverse engineer the formulas and numbers. Really, really hard. I was one of those people, and as a much younger person I ran a whole lot of tests on MMOs the embraced some numeric obfuscation to reverse engineer the numbers on mechanics so I could create optimally efficient paths. Just having a character spamming abilities thousands of times in a row, recording results and so on. Figuring that stuff out was basically a mini game.

Now in some games, like RPI type games that forbid ooc discussion, that is partly because they want to ban that behavior, of people talking oocly about mechanics in a way that would let them game the system. What happens then, of course, is that people that really, really know how to abuse systems become at a privileged position in the game with them and their friends. If the game has any competitive aspects at all they become extremely dominant, since new players don't have any way to access that knowledge with performing the same kind of exhaustive tests themselves.

So imo the way to stop min-maxing is to make strong, effective ways of designing characters be very, very, very intuitive and what someone would do anyways.

@faraday said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@apos said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.

I guess it depends. Unlike Arx, most MU*s are pretty small. The idea of potentially alienating up to 10% of your already-small population seems like something many games would want to factor into their design decisions - even if that decision is ultimately "screw it, we're using email".

Yeah, I can understand that as a major concern. I think I should rephrase what I'm saying as, 'I think game runners worry too much about loud voices that have been in the hobby for eons, and it's a bigger danger to alienate a much larger base of players by trying to appease them'. If a game runner can appeal to both, no reason not to.

@ashen-shugar I personally might further divide it up into useful sub topics for social like, "How do you get involved in stories", "How do you handle conflicts you find oocly frustrating", "What are the differences between MU RP and other rp formats", etc. That might keep people's input more focused.

@faraday said in Favorite Minigames:

• Mary is ignoring the +scavenge system, but is RPing having scavenged something nifty from the rubble anyway.

This makes for an interesting digression because I had this exact same worry about pretty much all systems that effect how people RP, and imo if you could pick one thing to feel reassured in general about MU communities being largely pretty good folks, it would be from this.

I was really worried about just this happening with coded objects, and what I found was it basically never came up. I've only had to mention this maybe a few times 'hey that really should be a coded object' and each time it was just a small misunderstanding. What I discovered really is that it pretty much falls into the, 'Well, @emit can say anything, how do you stop your players from doing crazy, ridiculous things?' and it just doesn't come up much, as long as the objects or standards are visible to everyone. People want to be respected and liked for their RP, and because of that, if there's a clear community standard like X things are objects that come from a +command, they just won't do it because no one wants to look bad in RP.

I think, with just how so much of MUSH rp culture is self-enforced, as long as something is clearly visible to players, we as game runners don't need to worry about that part.

@three-eyed-crow said in Travel Times - Enforced?:

My own question is, whether a game designer can serve one audience while not alienating the other, and I'm not really sure that's possible. Unlike crafting, there's really no way to ignore that you're spread out on a giant grid of multiple planets that take days to travel to. Not that a game designer has to serve both audiences, mind. Ideally there are lots of niche games that serve lots of types of players. I don't know that the giant grid game can work long-term without a very large playerbase, though.

In my experience, I think the hardcore purists who really want a very narrow scope of something are the minority. Most people even if they have an appeal of 'Oh I like more realism for my immersion' or 'I like more handwaving so it doesn't get in the way of RP' are okay as long as there's a general nod in their direction and are willing to compromise a little, so compromise systems I think do pretty well.

I'm not above anyone humming loudly and pretending the code doesn't exist either if that's not their jam, but hopefully I can keep trying to get it more intuitive and friendly as time goes on.

@packrat said in What is your turning point?:

Weirdly I have a kind of hard mental cut off for scheduling RP, outside of specific events. If somebody say asks if I will be free 7pm on Tuesday to RP?

The internal response is almost immediately a kind of mental FUCK NO! NEVER!

Even if I was originally probably planning to be around and RPing at that time.

I dunno why, but as soon as RP is hard scheduled with a date and time I just don't enjoy it. It carries a feeling of obligation, and it's no longer fun. I'll do it for people because some people can't RP otherwise and need me to help move their stories along, but I just think of it as work. I'm glad they enjoy it, but I often am so dialed out that when people talk up about how they loved the RP I have no idea what they are talking about since I don't remember the scene at all. It was a job that was taken care of.

@thenomain said in Helpful Spellcasting Flowchart:

But I've also coded similar systems all throughout WoD and people almost never get so touchy about them as they do with this.

People that have paid their dues in learning something unnecessarily complicated tend to be very protective of that. This makes for extremely unhealthy environments as it effectively encourages hazing of new players rather than helping them, and is particularly true of more competitive rather than collaborative environments. See RPI muds, where understanding the internal game mechanics gives someone a competitive advantage, for example. Another example are complaints about games being dumbed-down when they are changed to be made more accessible, even if the original system was inscrutable or just plain bad.

@magee101 said in A (Mildly Complete) List of Current Games:

@zaroot said in A (Mildly Complete) List of Current Games:

Star Wars Dawn of Defiance is still active: http://swdod.com/Main_Page

"active" is a very loose phrase. I've checked on the place from time to time, it's mostly idle people.

I'm not sure we want to go down a rabbit hole of debating whether games are active. I think if the owners feel it qualifies, we leave it at that, whether it has 6 players or 600.

Let me just say that Tekmonkey/Nemesis, Rick Sanchez, Elsa and others are posters there and didn't particularly stand out.

@tinuviel said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

@apos said in When Staff No Longer Cares:

Saying 'this game will have a one year run' probably means it is effectively dead by month five, since no one will want to join a game that's half over.

True, but again that's not what I said. Every story has an ending, so too should every game. Go out with a bang than with a whimper. Games will die, regardless of staff's wishes, though 'people not joining' isn't at all the same as a game being dead.

That is true but it is an unbelievably bad idea to explicitly state this. An overwhelming majority of players in the hobby are invested in the illusion of permanence. It is a core component of why they play these games, and why they choose this RP format compared to others that do not have any sort of environmental permanence. Undermining that will absolutely gut a game's playability. Yes, every game will end. Telling them when it will end ensures it will taper off well before that, unless every player involved was invested in the premise from the start, which will also make it very niche.

It is functionally the same as saying to players, "Don't worry, nothing you do matters at all in game. Have fun!" Someone can do that and if they find success with it, more power to them, but I do not think it is a good idea. This only works if something is being presented afterwards, like reboots and new stories that someone can look forward to, and even then it has tough issues. I must recommend against ever explicitly stating an end to a game, if someone intends for it to be a healthy environment well before that.

@thenomain So say you have a friend that keeps doing yelp reviews about all the bars they get thrown out, and they almost always start with, 'So this is mostly my fault and I got drunk but let me tell you what an asshole the owner and bouncer was'. At some point you get concerned, and I'm having to be That Asshole that is telling you that no man, everyone I know was like, 'oh, it was Theno'.

I really think you should just reflect on that, and I think if you keep going, 'well they had bad behavior so let me talk about that' you are just doing yourself a disservice at this point.

@faraday Yeah, in my mind right now the best approach is to very strongly encourage mentoring and buddy approaches, since I've noticed far and away the people that become acclimated to the hobby and get most involved are the ones that have someone, anyone introducing them and talking them through it in a friendly, patient way. I think it's kind of addressing the symptoms more than the core problems but I think right now it's pretty much the best we got.

@Griatch One important thing that could be missed from my post is I was really only talking a very specific style of MUSH, and this is an important one to know when looking at the design requirements between MUD and MUSH. The MUSHes I'm talking about are ones that essentially have staff acting as personalized storytellers for players, with hands on, one on one development in a table-top type of feel. That just isn't something that scales unless you keep adding more tiers of staff overseeing story development. MUDs, on the other hand, scale essentially infinitely since the environment is automated and could theoretically handle any number of players.

Like comparing say, the MUDconnector or r/MUD or whatever to here, the amount of game owners trying to advertise and push their games is waaaaaaaaaay higher for MUDs than MUSHes for that reason, since there's no real bound on players imo.