Best posts made by Apos

I think the reason most of us immediate approach this from an angle of, 'ways people would abuse a yes-first' game is due to our experiences. For just about anyone that's staffed, we immediately think of disruptive players that are unable to be reasonable and more importantly are unwilling to recognize that they aren't reasonable, and those players would be the ones most attracted to something advertised as a 'yes-first' game.

The most problematic players that want to assign blame for their own faults to others are probably the most likely to go, 'Finally a game without ridiculous staff where I can do what I want, about time' and gravitate towards it, so unfortunately the game type most dependent on players to create their own constructive environment are likely the ones to be the most toxic.

@Sovereign I agree to a point. The very few hardasses are typically self-interested people that really get off on it, which are also the worst kind of people to have that kind of authoritarian control and destroy things pretty quickly. So the ideal is someone completely unafraid to make difficult choices that has no emotional investment in it at all, but also recognizes the importance of moderation and restraint when it's called for.

Someone that can siteban a creeper 2 seconds after realizing what they are doing rather than taking weeks of compiling unnecessary evidence, but also is friendly and outgoing to every new player, is approachable, and is genuinely interested in hearing out player concerns. Doesn't really help to have the first without the second imo, which is why you have all those threads about petty dictator types.

In my experience most of the blunt, hard nosed types are even more socially retarded than the most passive aggressive ones and just confuse a lack of tact or inability to understand other people with being honest and direct.

First, @surreality is impressive in being able to bring a thread back to topic.

Now I really like her points about player expectations vs reality and entirely different gamer cultures clashing since I think it's extremely accurate for an awful lot of cases, though I think we can echo the same thing about most staff. I think only a tiny percentage of staff is familiar with all these different subcultures of MU games, and even a smaller percentage of that has probably played most or all of them and enjoys them all for their own merits.

So when like a sandbox player goes to a non-sandbox, it's not just the playerbase that might alienate them. I know I've seen staff treat players that would be prized as exactly those fun, activity-generating types most needed on a sandbox as -problems-. "Omg, this player is crazy and doing things they aren't supposed to be doing! We need to stop their badfun!" And since staff isn't familiar with the other forms, they usually aren't even able to explain why something doesn't fit on their game, they just treat them as a disruptive loon. A lot of players are willing to shrug off other players being dicks to them on that same non-sandbox ('Bob never leaves his bedroom!'), but an authority figure? Nooooo.

@surreality I agree with all the points Surreality mentioned but also I'd point out that if I knew nothing of either party and saw a 'I will not play with X' list, it'd trip all kinds of red flags for me. Justified or not, I'd think in the back of my head, 'Man there must be drama around this person' and probably avoid the person that created the list. I think the same thing about people that have really combative notes in their +finger. You know, the ones that are like, 'DON'T COME TO ME IF YOU WANT X'. It's a vibe that makes me instinctively steer clear.

@mietze said:

And I 1000 percent agree that if someone is using the "I'd be all over you but poor me my other lady friend won't let me" excuse? Maaaybe the lady friend is a total bitch, but it's 99.9 percent the case that the poor guy caught "in the middle" is an even bigger asshole.

Yeah. "I'm really sorry you feel that way, but X is a friend whom I enjoy RPing with, and I'm going to RP with her even if you personally do not care for her." This is not that fucking hard to say. I have done this and it really is NOT hard. Shit, the funniest conversation I had in a MU was with an incredibly possessive and passive-aggressive player who had a reputation for stalkerish behavior, I had no idea, and when she sent me a page like, 'So whatcha doin?:):):):):)' after +where stalking me. I told her my self-destructive and flawed (by design) character was having a torrid affair because I thought it would make a good story. I thought she'd be amused by it. Hoo boy. Not so much.

@Arkandel said:

It's rare to see it as a Storyteller. I bring in NPCs the characters have every reason to fear but they don't show it. They'll give lip, stand defiant, try to negotiate... but they won't ever lose their composure, back down or be intimidated. Sometimes I'd like that as well, to see the hopelessness sink in. Everyone conquers their fears, it seems.

Man. This depends really, really heavily on MU culture. In a game where characters die often on plots and there's not full trust in the ST, you get to see some hysterical degrees of cowardice that are a full 180 from your experiences by players who are very attached to their characters but still feel obligated to go on plots.

One of my most memorable scenes was a plot involving characters going behind enemy lines, and an extremely well-liked player character got crippled as enemy forces were closing in. The other player characters had one of the most heated IC arguments I've ever seen about whether to have a last stand or abandon him until the officer in charge ordered us to abandon him, so that player lost his character. One of the most intense scenes I've done, and had very powerful elements that got to showcase heroism vs pragmatism in the face of hopelessness. Great RP.

From the far outside looking in, of someone that knows basically nothing about D/s and has basically zero interest in it, it seems very weirdly puritanical to be upset at people for, well, doing it wrong. Like, 'yeah, okay, do whatever you like, I won't judge you guys' and then have someone off to the side telling me that I actually should be judging them. Dunno about that.

Uh, the difference is that @Sovereign's victims were really, really, really not fucking okay with what he was doing. What you are talking about is consensual, and both people are very much okay with it.

@ThatGuyThere I actually don't think it's because L&L players prefer political RP over adventure-style RP, even though it seems that way from how the games develop, but more of a consequence of the way MUs tend to operate.

I think it's more of a natural progression of what happens during downtime. In between plots, on more sandbox-y games players feel a lot more freedom to run meaningful PrPs since there's more of the expectation that it doesn't really effect other people very much. In a lot of L&L games, that's not really the case, so PrPs tend to be de-emphasized and that leaves players doing political RP as one of the more consequential forms of RP they can pursue without GM assistance. Then that RP produces actions that require GM response, and you are getting in a cycle of players RPing about what they can away from adventuring stuff and GMs just responding to it, and never creating the kind of stories a lot of people would find interesting. So I think it's more of a sign of a less robust GMing approach than it's really just, 'All the players here love politics and nothing else', and I'd wager a lot of those players are just doing it to pass the time when they'd really enjoy the same things you would.

Hm, I don't think I fall so much into the 'are you drawn to a character, or are you drawn to a setting?' type question. It's whatever story happens to grab me for the game, really. Might be my own character, might be supporting the story of someone else's character, might be a transformative story about the setting itself. I think that alternating focus is just part of collaborative RP and what makes it fun.

@VulgarKitten said in Finding roleplay:

Does anyone ever feel like Carrie at the prom when asking for RP on the public channels?

I pretty much should play youtube clips of the, "THEY ARE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU" for how I feel when I ask, yeah.

@Arkandel Yeah, one of my most popular characters was an utterly repulsive asshole with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Loud, smelly, crass, unpredictably violent, absolutely unrepentant thug who engaged non-stop in deplorable behavior. But like, I was privately shocked (and frankly a little unnerved) by how often he got propositioned, just because I tried to make him also funny. The game had coded social rolls like seduction, and I enjoyed trying them since they would never, ever do anything but spectacularly botch due to his absolute lack of any kind of social skills and was therefore hilarious.

But he was also a roster character, and I was told that basically every previous player of the same character was not well regarded, and that also reinforces your point, in that the same character can then also magically transform from being hated to everyone wanting to RP with them because of the player.

Since it's a base framework and we wanted to be able to accommodate both RPI and mush players, we tried to heavily alias a lot of common commands in both formats to work. Like for example standard mush page syntax works, and standard 'tell' syntax in muds works also. Can't do it completely without rewriting the command line parser, but it probably won't feel that alien in terms of interface.

I was reading @Lithium's statement as 'Protagonists who are unwilling to risk character death <...oocly while still behaving in a manner that is very self-evidently risky are abusing the good nature of GMs who are unwilling to punish them for grandstanding behavior>'. I pretty much figure @surreality and @Lithium both agree that risk has to be meaningful and trivializing it in any fashion detracts from the environment.

I think it's so universal that everyone agrees, but there's just some bad eggs who ruin it by only wanting risk to be very risky for everyone else and not themselves, and some staff are just too nice to bring them back into line. Or worse the abusers are staff and punish everyone else while giving themselves or friends a pass. Environment just kind of collapses when people get away with that.

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

Which I think brings me to another relevant point: maybe the question in the title is just inherently bad. How does a MU* become successful? MU*s aren't successful. To become successful, they would need to become something else entirely. Were I designing my own, I'd probably combine MUD & MUSH elements with play-by-post and instead design a user-friendly website with a dynamic map/chatroom application, auto-logging features accessible in a navbar, player/character profiles, etc.

Well, I dunno about saying 'MUs aren't successful', since I think anyone running a game they and their players enjoy are successful on their own merits, but I would just rephrase it as, 'In order for a MU* to have strong appeal to role-players outside the MU* community'. And in that I largely agree, though I think it takes a really long time to get there. The, 'yeah we need to replace archaic type terminal windows with something with a more modern and accessible feel off the web' is definitely a big deal and a compelling long term goal, but I think the game can have a pretty strong appeal if it focuses on the other areas you mentioned first, like having stuff that appeals to play-by-post players who has a distinctly different style than MUs.

@ThatGuyThere I don't think you're all that pessimistic so much as a realist that a lot of games have no desire at all to be larger, since doing so would compromise the ability of staff to deal with people on a one-on-one basis. There's a very concrete upper bound to how much time head staff has after all, and if they want to deal personally with each player on the game in a routine way, that makes games of thousands of players impossible. They've already decided what kind of game they wanna be, they are happy with it, and there's nothing wrong with that.

It just seems to me to be a very important consideration when the topic question was about "How does a MU become successful" was taken to meaning how popular it was, when a lot of games cannot go past a certain point without losing their identity and how they work. For other games that are designed in mind with accommodating a much bigger pool of players, it's different and they can feel free to go for it.

@Lithium I would think that would call for something like: "I'm sorry you feel that way and I hope you guys find the right game that appeals to you and wish you all the luck in the future." I mean some folks just can't collaborate and it's okay to part ways, I figure.

@surreality Yeah, that's how I pretty much see it, and I'm not really in love with the terms alpha/beta (I feel kind of pretentious using them), but I think it is helpful to give people an idea of what I'm doing and try to let them decide how comfortable they are playing in a game in an early state. Like if someone isn't comfortable with major systems coming in and their work possibly poofing or being completely changed a week later, I can't blame them for not wanting to play under those conditions and preferring to wait for it to be more settled in beta/release, but other people have a lot of fun with testing and breaking all the things and just shrug off anything being changed.

Tying into the rest of the thread, I think probably the biggest single source of conflict in the hobby is just people feeling like their time/effort isn't respected, whether they are a staff or player. So with that in mind, I figure I or anyone else running a game has to be really, really, really careful with making sure they don't ever give anyone the wrong idea where they think all their hard work is for keeps when it is potentially transitory.

Anyone that takes staff for granted like that generally are the same people that would never ask themselves, "This character concept/plot/RP is fun for me, but is it fun for anyone else to interact with?" I just don't understand. If the person making a character wouldn't want to interact with it, how can they expect anyone else to want to do so in a collaborative storytelling environment?