@tinuviel said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:
@thatonedude If ya don't want staff interaction getting in the way of your stories, go read a book.
I personally recommend "How to Maintain A Consistent Game Environment Without Creating Unnecessary Hurdles That Stifle Roleplay", it's part of the This Shit Ain't That Hard trilogy.
@Ominous said in The Metaplot:
This ties into xp bloat. "Oh, there is a metaplot? Well, why should I care, since superman will save the day anyways?" If one person has all the skills and stats to solve all of the problems, it's hard to create a plot that requires group effort. It's like playing the Pandemic board game but giving one of the players three of the role cards and four extra actions. You have to ask "Why are there other players in this game at this point?"
While I understand this to an extent, it's kind of mystifying to me. To me the idea of not being able to design stories for someone is so alien I just don't understand it. Sure they might be more difficult to challenge but unless a character is literally a bag of stats with no personality, goals or interests it really ain't that hard to make a narrative they'll find interesting.
@Calibraxa Hm, we might fit what you're looking for in Arx, possibly. Have 104 players on right now as I post this, so might avoid some of the pitfalls with a smaller playerbase in terms of creating RP, but it's still a work in progress and I certainly wouldn't say we're perfect.
@ganymede said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:
@apos said in Celebrities that are Dead To Us:
Predatory individuals have relied upon the willingness of others to dismiss something not easily provable for decades. It is very prevalent to many people's daily experiences. This is a backlash against that, and it is a good thing.
Sure, I understand this. Cosby's laundry list is long. Roy Moore's hometown corroborated how much of a sleaze he was.
But Takei? That's a single accuser for an act that occurred around 36 years ago. I'm not so willing to run him under the bus quite yet. I'd like to learn more.
Yeah I agree, they all should be taken in different contexts. There's some people accused that I just don't think are that awful, and some that I think are pretty vile. I agree with your post earlier about degree being really important.
@Ganymede Seconded about potato. I thought double input windows sounded dumb and now I can't imagine not having them.
Now if I could only disable the update reminders.
I think anything that's very episodic in feel has some issues translating to MUs, since it takes a lot of work to make an environment that can sustain itself between episodes that highlight the kind of high adventure vibe you want to capture. Tabletop and other RP environments don't have to deal with that since there -isn't- a persistent environment. Every game deals with that a little but if high adventure is the selling point, it's disproportionately represented compared to other games.
@three-eyed-crow said in A new platform?:
I realize some Mushers don't use spawn windows but I struggle to imagine functioning without them, and shifting channels to other tabs/rooms ala discord and slack just feels like that, only less work on my end.
I think spawns are a great idea, but I don't use them kind of because of the nature of talking in discord vs a MU. Like in discord with friends, I might drop a comment and respond to something a few hours later, it's a very asynchronous messenger. Maybe a conversation will pass by, but I can catch up whenever.
MUs often don't really have that feel. There might be 10 different questions in 10 different ways, that all happen at the same time and if I miss them then, like if they are filtered to a spawn I check 40 minutes later, it's probably irrelevant and someone logged off and missed something they wanted to know. The format isn't really nearly as great in easily referencing old information, which puts an emphasis on immediacy, mostly because tools like mail or channel histories or whatever are so clunky. So because of that, I feel like I need to be focused more on when things happen for immediate relevance, than being able to sort them and check tabs at my leisure like I would in discord.
We've talked about this 'empathy' issue before, in regard to judges and other things.
I think the comments made in this thread are quite revealing of the dangers of empathy.
I think a little more empathy might have led to different decisions in Korematsu v. United States, Dred Scott v. Sanford, Buck v. Bell, or Plessy v. Ferguson. And Bowers v. Hardwicke might not seem all that old to you, but quite a few voters have been born after it, and it seems pretty alien to them to have so little empathy that it was once established law.
@Sessurea Yeah, and that's a depressingly common sentiment I've heard echoed a lot. I don't really think the demographics of MUs have changed at all, but the people looking for meaningful character development on a grid get elbowed out if there's not any kind of strong draw bringing people back there to have grid rp happen in an organic fashion. It's a really important design element that I think is dangerous to ignore, where staff can just shrug and say, 'whelp, up to players to get out there and make RP'.
@gangofdolls I think you pretty much should always do it, and if you have doubts about whether you should just say, 'Hey I don't wanna make a big deal about this, and I'm not sure this is actionable, but this happened so you know just in case it points to a larger pattern'. It can be decisive if there was larger issues and even something you had that seemed minor was indicative of a larger, worse pattern of behavior.
@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:
It was designed as a tool kit, and oWoD was designed as a world on its last, dying breath. One of them may be fun to play and all, but the other made you involved, made you want to buy the next book to see what was up.
Yeah this pretty much sums it up for me. It could be dumb at times, but it was bold and made for a vivid world and story, and there felt like real feeling and investment into the story. The cosmology of something like oWoD demon or mage or vampire really grabbed me, and the whole story of the God Machine just doesn't do it for me.
@goblin said in Tomorrow is the Deadline....:
The fact you have to register to do something that is your full right has me so entirely baffled. Why is it like that? (Honest question, no sarcasm here.)
Isn't citizenship good enough?
Every four year over here, every eligible voter gets sent a voting card. No charge, no registering - we're already registered to be citizens. Then we go vote, bringing our voting card and ID, they compare it to the 'voting ledgers' and notes down that this person voted and which instances they voted for (and then of course there's several checks along the way before the final results are in.)
The designers for American governance were very shaped by federalism, and wanted to place a great deal of authority in the hands of our individual states, meaning that control is at a local level, so we have county boards and state boards of elections, and only broad federal government oversight. You can imagine how wildly inefficient and confusing this is with a lot of different layers of government that in theory work seamlessly together but in practice have no idea what they are doing and create an kafkaesque nightmare.
@Sessurea To answer seriously I think there needs to be a fundamental drive to make grid RP meaningful and provide incentives for doing so, particularly when the game is not a sandbox and can have significant consequences for acting like a tool in public. I don't think the player bases of most MUs are all that different, but like if you take a sandbox where people can feel like they can say and do whatever they want in public, and take a side-by-side comparison with a game where you have social pressure that causes creepy players to feel alienated or punished if they show their creepiness, you see the proportion of players that would be incredibly creepy either stop playing or tone down their behavior.
I think this is more of the responsibility of staff to set the right tone and environment (positive reinforcement while weeding out truly disruptive elements), but if players are playing in a game where staff obviously does not care about it enough to enforce it, the most players can do is rp intentionally in public as a group and welcome strangers while continually vetting every new person that tries to join. That's excruciating and slow, and imo should never fall upon players to do this.
@saosmash said in How should IC discrimination be handled?:
@arkandel You know you're feeding the troll, right? Roll your eyes and move on. Their stated position is as far from constructive as it is possible to be.
Yea, registered recently. I've never met anyone that held those kind of stances that didn't also get extremely offended when similar stuff was directed at them, so their life philosophy is easiest summed up as, "Any kind of offense directed at me is bad and should stop immediately, any offense directed at others they should suck up because they are oversensitive."
@roz said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@sparks Right. The thing that turns off newcomers is the immediacy and the requirement to set aside multiple hours per night several nights a week to play effectively. This is a huge turn off to casual players.
That's not actually been my experience. I mean, it may turn off some newcomers, but there are also a lot of other options out there with much slower pacing for those people. My experience is that there are people who are ready to dive in to the kind of pacing we have on MU*s, but their turn off is the technology. They have to download a client and connect to this game and figure out commands and learn all the lingo that everyone already knows. When I was on staff at Transformers: Lost & Found, we got a lot of these kinds of RPers. Their experience is maybe somewhere like Tumblr, and there's a really high bar of education that a lot of us don't really think about.
So for me, a new web-based system isn't about adjusting pacing. It's about adjusting user-friendliness.
Yeah this has been true from my experience. Like if you take free form chat environments, that happen with largely identical or faster pacing to MUs, there's at least a few hundred thousand people that do that pretty regularly. They have way, way bigger populations than MUs. But even people that RP in a very similar environment find it difficult to transition, and it's almost always the format cited, with the 'I need to download something' and 'the syntax is really intimidating and confusing' for command line stuff. And if the MUSH has off game materials, like needing to buy books (well, steal PDFs), that's another big bar to entry.
I dunno if there's a huge rush to fix it though, since non-sandboxes would have a lot of trouble handling the kind of populations that would be possible by tapping into the big RP communities. I just can't see a MUSH being able to sustain like 15k people without fundamental design differences.
@Pandora said in Do You Do A Writing?:
Then there are the comments so full of flattery and praise when they ask for an update you just don't have the heart to say you've completely lost interest in the story, so you just pretend you didn't see them.
You're all writers here - anyone have any tips for trying to get back into a story you just don't feel connected to anymore?
Usually comes when what I think should happen bores me or I find uninteresting to write. So I make myself not write what I think I should, but what I would enjoy, and then see if I can reconcile it.
@Entropy I think what you want is very admirable, and it's something most people would generally enjoy. I'd also be extremely surprised if you got any firm commitments in private messages offering to help or do anything for you.
I don't mean to say that to be discouraging. But I think if you want to build an ideal game, the hard reality is that you probably are going to need to do all the work and not so fun stuff yourself. If you want to launch a sandbox with almost no code, you can do that, but then in order to sell the game and make it popular and people will want to play there, you have to be such a good storyteller that people log in there to participate and give it a shot, and you have to go through the work of building an RP community yourself. Once it's established, people will be rolling in and you'd have to be the one still to then preserve the positive community you created. So you'll have a massive amount of work in building that great community, and then once people see it is great, you damned well will have a crazy amount of work in maintaining it. If you are selfless enough to say, 'I'm willing to devote a year or two of all my free time to make this work', people will love you.
But they probably won't help you.
@arkandel I noticed a difference too, with the pace being much slower on nWoD in my limited experiences there. I attributed the spacing to how the game system puts the impetus of managing rules more on the players themselves with it being less coded, which in turn I think emphasizes a strict pose order since the consequences of someone being skipped or passed over is much higher.
In a fully coded combat game, often a pose or emit would effectively be purely social, but in less coded non-consent environment where players are all expected to keep track of themselves rather than coded, that could mean they miss their round in combat or aren't given a fair shake. That in turn means it becomes expected out of politeness to be way more mindful of people's poses, which makes people much more reluctant to pose past someone being slow, which grinds the pace down. And then since everyone knows the pace will be slow, plays accordingly. In something more freeform or consent driven or non-consent but heavily coded, I don't think those consequences are a factor, so it might still be rude to talk over someone but it wouldn't have dramatic consequences for them if you do, so it's just not as big a sin and the culture embraces a faster pace accordingly.
To not be totally off topic and tie this to what Gany and Surr are talking about, I think the system then also rewards people for being a little pushy, in so much that everyone is expected to watch out for themselves in a way, which probably fosters that behavior that shows in entitled ways.
@rook said in Alternative Formats to MU:
@Roz
I would wager to say that, of those players that you describe, there are very few of them that are expecting or settling for a text-only medium, to begin with."What? No pictures? I'm out!"
There's something important here that I think anything next gen should really think about when thinking of alternate formats to MUs and going back to the original point of the thread. I think very, very few MU players are purists where they -wouldn't- use pictures or graphical representations in their RP if it was a) very easy to do so, and b) not jarring or offputting.
I am not someone that pays attention to PBs generally, and don't have much of an interest in making wikis. I know I am in a distinct minority with that outlook. People really, really want visual mediums of expression to go with their RP, and that is heavily represented in people using imo worse formats like tumblr specifically because it also gives them easy means to do so, in attaching some gif or image to their rp posts that captures a mood or theme.
While it is natural to think, 'oh god people would obnoxiously spam memes in RP and I would run screaming from that', I do not think there is any reason things have to develop in that way, and I also think that the hobby would be immeasurably more popular with smoothly accessible, tasteful ways of visual expression going hand in hand with the RP.
@Kanye-Qwest said in A Lack of Imagination:
@Apos said in A Lack of Imagination:
@faraday said in A Lack of Imagination:
Meanwhile if you asked me to describe my kitchen, like @Ninjakitten says, I could do so in fact-based terms... the cabinets are brown, the sink is right by the back door, the stove is gas with five burners... but I don't really see a vivid image in my mind. It's more like fuzzy still pictures at best.
It's interesting in that there's definitely degrees, between people that have photorealistic imaginations vs fuzzy imagery vs nothing at all. For me, asking me what color things are in the kitchen is a lot like asking me to remember the calendar date that something happened. I can take a guess. It might be right, might be wrong, I have no idea though I might sometimes get an extremely vague sensation.
What color are my eyes, HMM?
Don't hate me if I can only answer that because I can remember the conversation we had about it.