Best posts made by Apos

@Cirno said:

This raises interesting questions - is MU* ing a gentrified, expensive hobby out of reach to the poor? Could that be part of the reason why the population of MU* players is low in general? And why is this, since computers have sharply decreased in price? One can acquire a cheap tablet or netbook for 50$ or so.

I don't think it's that, not when you look at tens of millions of people playing MOBAs and MMORPGs, it's hard to look at it from a scarcity standpoint. I think MUSHes offer something unique that's pretty hard to explain. If you google 'text based role playing games', I flipped through a few pages and saw a few MUDs and a -lot- of browser games that are kind of MUD like, but nothing like what most MUSHers enjoy. It's pretty easy for people that have never played an rpg at all before to grasp playing a dude on a MUD and running around killing things in a world. I think it's a lot harder to get across how a collaborative storytelling narrative game works, and I'd be curious what people's elevator pitches of a MUSH are like to people that have never played any form of RPG before.

@SG Yeah, I've seen it done really well and really badly. For the ones I felt were really well done, I really see two requirements and this doesn't necessarily mean it has to be small but you can tell why it helps: 1) I think that for it to be done well, the plots have to be accessible to pretty much any played character. 2) And I think the GM has to be so familiar with every character that can be involved to make it reasonably structured to them to make it meaningful. Partially customized, if not fully.

I think the only reason this sounds so unreasonably high a bar is because most MUs have become super insular and characters are very likely not familiar with each other. In thinking of one counter example, I played on a place with hundreds of characters that I could have recited from memory what their personalities and goals were like, and that was just due to the really high degree of interaction, not because I'm anything special memory wise.

@faraday There's a lot of random, dumb and arbitrary deaths that happen when it's left purely to chance and I think we know how it can rob everyone of an extremely good story when 'well, it seems the protagonist fell down a cliff and died' leaves everyone with a pretty stupid anti-climax.

My feeling in addressing the problem players that @Coin mentions is to have more perceived risk than actual risk. I really, really hate killing players, but it's not that bad for dramatic tension if they think it is way worse than it actually is.

@Arkandel I think there's a few different ways to handle the idle clog, and it depends on how code heavy you want to be really and where you want the balance to fall in allowing new players to shake up the order versus preserving the old. If you want to go with totally player controlled player voting, you don't need to weight status vote at 1 vote per 1 dot either. You could change that multiplier to decide just how easy or hard you want to make ousting anyone, or even reduce/increase a modifier based on someone's activity and so on. Automated modifications based on player activity would remove accusations of staff bias but let people attempt to game whatever system you have in place.

I would lean away from hard activity requirements as such, since they feel punitive and are a big turnoff for something as casual as a game and would be contrary to your yes-first philosophy. I would try to look more at incentives for activity for any leadership figure, particularly when they are interacting with players outside of their circle of friends. XP is probably the easiest carrot to work around, but problematic in how much you want to manage the power of characters. However I don't think a one time reward for the first time someone has a scene with another character would be unreasonable for example, and create an incentive for any leadership figure to meet a new character hitting the grid.

I heartily approve of your style for design even if it's kind of the far other side of what I'm going for, but to me I think either tightly controlled for the story or extremely loose and liberal are totally fine as long as players are treated reasonably and with respect.

@Nein Your post is good since honestly almost all of those can be solved with just an extremely good, positive staff and aren't necessarily core problems to the hobby. While I might disagree on some fundamental aspects with Ark's design, frankly I think any game Arkandel is likely to run would probably avoid any of the pitfalls except the Queen Bee issue since that would be expected to be addressed by players. A constructive and reasonable staff focused on internal consistency and story goes a hell of a long way, and I almost feel like I could say, 'Yeah do everything you said and just ban trolls immediately and you're fine'.

@Arkandel I was actually speaking from personal experience of repeatedly catching people at chargen.

"Thank you for your interest, but you are not a good fit for this game, sorry" kind of way. Obviously you won't catch anyone that makes a good effort at hiding how damaged they are, but absolutely I've had to restrict or turn away people that just screamed problems in big blazing letters on the screen.

As for severity, in my experience everyone worries about banning people that don't deserve it but that doesn't really happen so much as, 'Gosh, this person has been sending lewd pages to women. Let's warn him and oh good he says he understands and promises to stop' and a month later he is still there and 5 or 6 women have stopped logging in for mysterious reasons.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

I just never say 'I'm bored' on channel. Never. Because it does, to me, come off as "Entertain me, masses!", however anyone means it.

Man, I sure read it that way every time and it pisses me off disproportionately. At best, I silently decide to never, ever have anything to do with someone that says that again because I'd just feel like I'm coddling a whiner. If anyone on this board does that (who am I kidding, I've -seen- people on this board do this in games), please fucking stop.

@faraday I'm pretty much in the favor of a roster if you're playing with a closed group, or at least roster idled out characters (which I know some players would be very not okay with, since it's their baby that only they could play right etc). I would be adverse to not using a roster in a truly closed population where the only answer is 'they were there all along', especially if the population is thematically too small to really vanish into. I think this is one of those settings where there can be a real problem of scale. Like obviously if it's a game where there's only a hundred people dropped on a desert island, eventually the numbers would run out for character generation slots. I personally would just avoid that particular subset of these games in favor of a less defined number unless someone really wanted to go full out roster for it.

@Lithium Like I get that the RP being done comes across as reinforcing abusive and negative stereotypes that you find problematic, and I can even understand being offended by that, but since it's consensual adults having fun then I'd would just make a point of trying to show positive versions that you like that are illustrative of how are things done right in your opinion.

I honestly don't have a strong opinion about this since I know nothing about D/s and that is probably never going to change, but if I see character concepts or RP I find distasteful I just avoid it or see if people would be down for RP from another angle that might reinforce positive things that they'd find fun. If it's really from a position of not knowing at all about something, they might even appreciate it as long as it's done in a respectful and entertaining way. Just can't come across as elitist or condemning even if it's something I don't much care for.

Nothing wrong with being succinct for emphasis.

Two weeks divided by number of people waiting as a maximum, rounding down. ie, a dozen people waiting I think admin should resolve it same day.

Some of the forum play-by-post roleplaying things are downright gigantic in population and there's some really huge MMO roleplaying communities, and most all of them are dominated by younger people. It's kind of a hard sell for a lot of them to try out MUs, since extremely few people have played tabletop games before- most have never even heard of them, let alone MUs, but I found even roleplayers used to total free form, system-less full consent things tend to be fine on MUs once they get used to them.

I think mushes are the best format for offering one very specific roleplaying experience, in having a truly dynamic world with a lot of people at once that is still persistent and accessible. It's just kind of hard to get that across in an elevator pitch to people that have never heard of it.

@Arkandel said:

IMHO one of the benchmarks to see if your game might be going the wrong way is if you have Flintstones-minded people trying to fix the apocalypse on channels, purely OOC. Let's build a steel wall, surrounded by an acid-filled moat leading into corridors with zombie-killing grinders powered by zombies on treadmills who're also providing infinite electricity, woohoo. If that gets traction it's all going into a different direction.

I think that might be lack of clear thematic direction really than a game breaking down. Some people, me included, agree that post-apocalyptic games are fun because you can play up the pathos of these tragic interactions and how they deal with a new, broken world and the whole struggle for survival. Other people are like, 'The characters on the Walking Dead are dumb, I would be so much better on it and if I'm playing a game like that I'll show them all'. It's totally different mindsets and I think it just has to emphasize the first is what the game is going for and not the second.

@Arkandel said in Finding roleplay:

To take this thread in a slightly different direction... do you think incentivizing public scenes helps in practice?

What I mean specifically here is either +vote systems with diminishing returns for the same recipients so that players have an extra reason to seek out new partners, higher XP for larger scenes, etc.

Do you think these have a positive impact on whether you can find roleplay? Please forget any other effects of them for the purposes of this thread - power balance, etc - and focus on RP generation. Does it have that effect?

Yes. Night and day difference.

@Sandor said in Play-by-post analog to MUSoapbox:

RP Online, IIRC, is all play-by-post.

I don't think they do. I'm just surprised that such a common way of playing has gone under the radar so thoroughly. I mean, MUDConnector is a veritable encyclopedia of obscure-ass MU*'s that get practically no play at all, and here we are with a mode of play that I can't find an analogue to that for.

I was curious so I googled and looks like @coin is right, http://rpol.net/ has a few thousand play by post games going. Weird interface, had to click at bottom and search, but I think that's what you're looking for.

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

From a taste perspective the heavily coded part does not appeal to me. But if that was a teaser line for a book or movie I would buy it in a second. Hope your game is a lot of fun and you and your players enjoy the telling of what promises to be an interesting story.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

I'm hoping a lot of die hard mush players won't find the code as off-putting as they fear it would be. For me, the greatest appeal for mushes is how free form it is, and how much opportunity someone has to really make their own story. And in direct contrast to that, a lot of RPI's try to code everything and limit characters just to that code only, and force characters into narrow decisions that don't really fit what a character would do, removing decisions from players. Some players really enjoy that MUD feel, but I fall way closer to the mush spectrum for storytelling.

So while I don't think I can please everyone (as you said, it's taste), my goal is definitely not to remove the storytelling strengths of mushes that I think most people on here really enjoy, but to try to provide a few more tools to players so they aren't as reliant on GMs to take actions that can be very consequential.

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

Hope your crossover project is successful, sounds like a lot of work melding two potentially drastic cultures in regards to what constitutes 'RPI' and what it means; assuming you're trying to draw in Mud folks towards the free form or mush versus reliance on full code to account for everything.

I don't think it's as hard as it sounds, since I think most people are pretty forgiving with adjusting a little to different environments just as long as the game is giving them fun things to do, the game's format isn't infuriatingly difficult to learn, and they don't feel like their own RP ideas and stories are being shut down. Don't think we can appeal to everyone, but I think most roleplayers are generally pretty okay with new formats as long as they are enjoying the RP.

@ixokai You do have a point there, though I suspect a lot of this is people trying to use a familiar command, finding it's not there and getting a, 'I have to learn everything again? Well, screw this' reaction. I don't even think that really makes people lazy or anything like that, so much as MU formats can be really arcane and downright annoying to learn. For command type stuff, that might not be so terrible since we can try to replicate a lot of different formats with heavy command aliasing so it feels more intuitive to players. Can't fix all of it, since a lot of games have mutually exclusive commands that do wildly different things with the same formats, but hopefully enough where just logging in and getting started doesn't feel like work. An alpha tester saying, 'GOD WHY CAN'T I <command I've never heard of>' basically has me scramble since it's that immediate gut reaction that I worry about.

And of course on the huge fundamental storytelling differences between games, that's a whole other animal and set of challenges to worry about.