Best posts made by Apos

My feeling about the metaplot is it doesn't have to be immutable. There's a balance between allowing dynamic change that makes players feel that they are active agents for change versus providing an environment that's stable enough where they feel they have thematic elements they can depend upon and play off of. Like I feel superhero games focused on feature characters are the furthest extreme in the latter category since their primary draw is wanting to play recognizable characters, so changing them significantly undermines their appeal. On the other hand, original theme games benefit the most from dynamic change since it gives people a personal ownership over part of the world that they can point to and say they did that.

I think it should be extremely -hard- to change core aspects of theme, but I think for the stakes to feel real then they have to be changeable. For example, would I allow the big bads to destroy the main grid and central city of Arx and wipe out half the current PCs? Sure. Would I let that happen trivially and the result of a few mistakes? Of course not, and no one player is probably ever going to be able to bring that about something that would irrevocably shatter the stories of everyone else.

@arkandel I more lean in the camp of clear, intuitive negative consequences for someone that has no ability or training in attempting to do something difficult. I just think there needs to be a very clear pathway to getting the help of characters that have that ability or training, and try to nudge that forward, since it fosters RP and interdependence. I don't think I need to necessarily restrict people coming into power that lack the ability, so much as having the consequences be consistent and automated if they try to act without help.

I dunno I just don't think most of the tabletop games are really super well suited to persistent worlds with potentially hundreds of people interacting with one another. Some can do okay but it's a really different scope and I think anything being adapted should just bear that in mind.

This might be a subject I spend a good deal of time thinking about. I think every game runner should, since people wanting recognition is imo a very fundamental aspect of the draw of these games to many people, and one of the largest sources of conflict.

Let me list some of the challenges that aren't mentioned too explicitly I think already, that everyone should bear in mind.

1. People have extremely different desires about spotlight and recognition, some can be polar opposites, and staff can have very poor outcomes if they try to treat rewards evenly here. Some people -hate- public recognition, as it makes them actively uncomfortable. Other people have it as their single most important goal in games, and relentlessly pursue it. The ones that share that goal will often hate one another's guts.

2. Trying to define effort on the part of players and reward it accordingly is extremely difficult, and there will always be unfair outcomes if you do it on the basis. This doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but that you need to be aware of the limitations. For example, who contributes more to a game out of the following? One person that spends 40 hours a week running social events that entertain dozens of other players at a time, or one person that greets a few new players a month and helps them get settled and involved into the game, or someone that spends 10 hours designing a new fun system that is heavily used by everyone on the game, or someone that cheers up three disappointed players and defuses drama, or someone that keeps mostly to themselves but never creates problems and always looking to pitch into offscreen actions and helping to coordinate them, or an exceptional writer that's zero drama that everyone widely likes and makes every scene they enter more fun but has no expectations or desire for a spotlight? These aren't easy things to convert numerically into ratings for who should be 'up'.

3. Similarly, the format we have obscures effort by its very design. Even if staff constructed an orwellian hellscape that saw everything and recorded everything without exception, unless that game is tiny, absolutely no one would ever have time to parse through that. A huge amount of effort that people do will always be unrecorded, and things people invest their heart and soul into can be overlooked by accident incredibly easily. What's worse, players are acutely aware of their own effort, while also not seeing the effort of anyone else, which leads to a natural tendency for a huge amount of people to think their efforts are much higher relative to everyone else than than really are, and everyone else's are much lower. It is incredibly easy in a MU format for someone to think they are deserving and other people aren't and feel entirely justified in that. I would bet money that a ton of people here can think of cases where players locked in some dumb fight with one another all thought people on the other side were staff favorites, and they were the persecuted ones. The format encourages it.

That's just the baselines that people have to bear in mind and work around. People want really different things when it comes to recognition, that effort is extremely difficult to measure, and that even knowing when someone invests effort is very difficult.

I think for that reason, it usually is a good idea to have the methods for gaining recognition clearly accessible with identifiable tools to do so, and mostly grant recognition based on the use of those tools and participation in a much narrower scope that can be much more easily controlled.

@haven said in Let's talk about TS.:

Is this thread here so we can see shit posts and decide OOCly who we would never fuck ICly?

Because right now, I will never TS any of you!

That worries me way, way, way less than the opposite. 'You made some solid points there. I'd now like to TS you'. Wait what.

@three-eyed-crow What I really want to avoid is, 'Someone didn't invite me and a friend to a party and I feel slighted'. While that's generally what players get worked up about, it's just not what the NPCs would care much about. Except maybe the Salon or something. Maybe Petty Social Slights That Should Get A Champion will be one of their core principles. But probably not.

For actual condemns, the only time I might bring it back is in an extremely narrow scope. I was considering opt in rivalries, which both players would have to voluntarily opt into, and then they could use condemns on one another, and only them (not their friends or the like). The lost prestige would go to a pool that is then in a ranking systems of Biggest Beefs of Arx or Top Rivalries or whatever, contributing to a current and lifetime total, and if they then settle their beef in a big dramatic twitter esqe mountainous molehill, they can try to flip the negative lost prestige into a positive, in self-indulgent and self-congratulatory celebrity fashion.

I'm optimistic, really. We have challenges, both cultural and technical, and an often hostile community that doesn't really provide a good foundation for games to succeed, and knowing all the shortcomings, I'd expect I would be pessimistic about the future, but I'm just not. There's a lot of roleplayers out there in newer generations, and MUs as a format still offer some things other games just can't. Brand new players are rare, but they do happen. I'm newer, after all, relatively speaking.

@misadventure said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

@apos I can confirm there are several people, myself included, who no longer find it productive to even mention criticisms about games you and Hellfrog are involved in. Those players either attempt to avoid your attention or opt not to play games you have significant say in.

Is that something you should consider?

Sure but I'm not involved in any games but Arx. I didn't know anything about Spirit Lake until this its ad thread was posted, and I do not have time for other games. I think if they are avoiding Spirit Lake because they mistakenly thought I was involved when I'm not says more about them than it does about me.

People are just asking that because they want to know what will make fun people seek them out for RP, and feel valuable and important. If something is needed but no one plays it, it's because the RP they get isn't fun, and they don't feel valuable and important despite being needed.

@Caryatid I legit think of this every time he comes up.

@SilentHills said in MU Things I Love:

probably some RP that's gonna make my char look crazier than a shithouse rat

mission accomplished

@Pyrephox said in Emotional bleed:

Part of my IC/OOC boundary routine is to try and make sure every character I play disagrees with me on at least one and often more than one fundamental value/motivation.

I really can't overstate this. I enjoy RP on a lot of characters I never have any significant attachment to, and I usually have aspects of them that I dislike, or think is profoundly wrong. I don't tend to play any character I'd fall in love with, if that makes sense. And I'm not saying that people shouldn't play characters they get excited about, or really like, but if something becomes an avatar for them in a profoundly intimate way, it can get really unhealthy really fast.

@VulgarKitten said:

MU Thing I Love: When someone does their damndest to make your character unplayable/make it unenjoyable for you to play your character, BUT you still play your character and still LOVE playing your character, and others still play with you and love your character, too.

Man, who DOES something like that? Glad you made it through fine.

@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:

@Kestrel

I would be okay with that second meta pose but a lot of people would bristle at it. It's entertaining and probably accurate. If you had posed how you thought he was a jerk but would never say so out loud, you are denying the other player retort to an insult. That is not okay.

Is it different if I use my character's silently-held disdain to explain the atmosphere of the scene? e.g.:

When @Thenomain walks up to Kestrel, she just glares. She thinks he's a jerk, but of course she'd never say that out loud. And so biting back her insult, she grits her teeth and says, "Good day... sir."

I think it's more common for mush RPers to just go a safer route of expressing the same thing without anything that can be taken as commentary. For example, rewriting it as When he walks up to Kestrel, she just glares, radiating hostility of things left unsaid. She grits her teeth and says, "Good day... sir." In this version it's very clearly something she can do and say, and there's no reading her mind or anything metapose-y about it, but gets across the same gist.

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

@Kanye-Qwest Nah. She types better than Apostate.

i dno't know waht you're tlaking abuot.

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

Am I going to stop pointing things like this out just because one staffer can't handle negative feedback from someone she doesn't like? No. Sorry. Arx is a fine game designed by a fine and level-headed man. It needs some serious work on its educational files (is there anything explaining the "reflection" or whatver the nickname for the land beyond death is yet?), but he knows this. He's failed to insult me, has talked me off the roof, and so I trust his judgement.

I clearly don't mind you making this about me, @Kanye-Qwest, but you really should stop. The game doesn't need this much defending, and certainly not from me.

It's not my game though. It's our game, and I include players in that 'our' too. Anyone that is contributing and collaborating on the story and investing their time is part of that, and by any metric @Kanye-Qwest are enormous and are a reason the game is as popular as it is. She spends all her time creating RP for other people, and constantly thinking of ways to help people with their stories, going out of her way constantly for people she doesn't know, and sure you guys flame each other on message boards but that doesn't make that any less true.

And I think her point is valid since she's protective of people being wrong-funned out of doing something, and it's so damned easy to do it in this hobby since everyone just runs on enthusiasm. Like for example, saying, 'I am not a fan of that color scheme. It's hard to read and don't care for it'. That's unobjectionable and even helpful. Saying, 'That is horrifying, never do ansi again. It is bad and you should feel bad' is mighty objectionable. Replace 'ansi' with writing or roleplay and you suddenly have people who hate each others guts and are chased out of the hobby and it's just so unnecessary.

I'm fine with people being extremely blunt in criticisms of me, but I would definitely ask people in game not to do it to others, and have. Like I see it all the time, and fortunately not much on Arx, but oh lord does it happen. Someone runs PRPs, they get bitched at, they stop. Head staff start out with the best of intentions, they run inclusive events open to everyone, they get bitched at, they retreat to private RP with just their friends and shut out new players. Head staff quit because of negativity. And so on. I'm not going to change how i do things because of people bitching at me but of course I'm sensitive to it since I see how incredibly destructive it is when people have to be practically begged to put themselves out there, and retreat the moment they get chided.

Yeah man I decided early on that I didn't need to design like mustache twirling assholes on the roster because if I make multiple goals that are mutually exclusive shit is gonna hit the fan regardless. Originally I made a few red herrings and then quickly found out it was TOTALLY unnecessary. I'd create something ambiguous and it would go in wild directions I never fucking dreamed of with how it was interpreted.

I'm sometimes really taken off guard by how popular some small roleplaying tools can be. A couple weeks ago @Tehom coded in a small command called +firstimpressions, to let a characters make a one-time-only record of the first time they interacted with another character, with a small xp incentive to nudge it along to encourage meetings and creating new relationships between characters. Two weeks later, there have been nearly 3000 unique records created of characters meeting for the first time.

People really like to RP.

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

@Sparks I hear Cardia is super nice and welcoming!

More like

I've never really noticed any significant difference in the hogpit and outside of it, and don't tend to notice where the threads are. Tbh to me the tone is the same, and the only difference is whether a thread is talking about something people feel strongly about or not.

Like any criticisms are going to become personal because of the nature of our hobby. All of us are creators, whether it's RP or games or code or whatever. And most people don't take criticisms of their creations or behavior so great, so pretty much any negative commentary about anything is going to swerve to the personal unless someone takes unbelievable pains to be gentle.

A lot of the advertisement threads follow this formula:

"Hi check out our game." "I tried it but the people there suck." "No maybe you suck." "No u"

And people wanna post their random flyby criticisms and throw shade without it ever being thrown at them so I dunno how you do that and make a healthy environment that allows people to talk about flaws in games or people without it becoming personal.