Best posts made by Apos

@Trix said in Consent in Gaming:

It was the responsibility of the person initiating the violence of the scene to ask permission if they wanted to do it and if they had, I would have refused to roleplay it out. The end result would likely have still happened, but maybe the refusal would have gotten across that I didn't want to play that way anymore and it would have been a FTB scene. My character already had two disfiguring injuries from the other character and I was annoyed at the possibility of RP'ing a third.

So I wanna emphasize this here. I think we'd generally be better off with a lot clearer boundaries that players can set for themselves as what they are comfortable with, but anything that's non-consent that involves torture and similar themes is so wildly unpopular that it would frankly be a good idea that FTB is the default for those, and it's assumed they will always be FTB unless all parties specifically say otherwise. I think it's a terrible idea to put someone in the position of having to feel like the wet blanket and the unfun person of saying, 'I don't want to play this out'. Over and over again, I see good roleplayers play things out that make them feel intensely uncomfortable because they don't want to feel they are ruining someone's fun, even when that fun is really creepy to a lot of people and guts their enjoyment of the game.

FTB should be the default, and if everyone would enjoy it, let them chime in to play it out.

@Otrere said in Firefly - Still Flyin':

@Sunny

Thank you! This isn't the first time I've heard the suggestion to not take everything from this forum as gold, and I do take that to heart. I also appreciate your kind words!

Yeah I wouldn't worry too much about it, people just have strong feelings about privacy policies which makes for lively debate on here but it probably won't matter too much one way or the other in running a game. If you're having fun running the game and spend a lot of time and energy making the game fun to play on, people are going to play regardless of almost any policy for the most part. They can be useful to have and help set a tone for a game that can matter, but frankly most people won't read them.

@mietze said:

This may be my bitch-fu speaking but in the last 6 months in particular there are a whole /hell/ of a lot of players playing on games that they never stop bitching about on chan, privately, here, whatever--all the while saying there's no where else to play.

Bitching is easy but making games is hard.

Is it me or are most of the, 'You abandoned me!' 'NO I WAS THERE ALL ALONG' arguments from dysfunctional IC couples arguing about whether one person is active enough? I'll take Shit I Never Want To Arbitrate As Staff for a thousand, Alex.

I'm sure people could correct me on my use of terms, but here's how I'm defining them for my own purposes:

Alpha: Putting in core systems and testing them and seeing base functionality. No GMing pretty much at all or story movement, so it's effectively a sandbox, with just some light seeding of story elements as a prologue. I was not expecting us to be this busy at this point in the game, and I absolutely do not blame anyone if they are like, 'I can't find things to do or feel it's difficult to get involved or code is too hard to use and offputting'. Those are all extremely fair criticisms and a lot of those things just aren't ones I'm focusing on right now, since there's too many core aspects I'm working on that I think would help long term sustainability. Also a fair criticism to say I should expedite things to help people have easier access now when they are hyped, but I see it as a trade off. It is very reasonable for a lot of people to not be interested in the game in this state, which is where we are right now.

Beta: When it's no longer a sandbox, and we're actively GMing and moving the story forward, and see how a lot of the macro systems work in progress. I view it as entirely possible I could have made a catastrophic mistake or two that will make revamps necessary as I see how things come together, which is why I'd prefer to call it a beta in the full knowledge I might have to wildly tweak systems, and this is where we hope to really put in most of the systems that would help players create their own story long term. Dynamic rooms, storytelling support for PRPs, and similar systems.

Release: Probably will aim for when the first major chapter of the opening story is done, to coincide with me being satisfied that no major system will need to be completely overturned or there will be a need for mass retcons and things like that. Where I picture a reasonably consistent continuity and if I dropped dead of a heart attack the game wouldn't immediately lapse into stasis even if the metaplot stalled.

Take all advice with a grain of salt, even this. Maybe especially this, but I hope it helps.

One of the defining factors of the medium we roleplay in is how hidden most activity will be. I'd say even on games with a culture of publicly logging everything, that still holds true, in so much that other people won't have the time to get the context from that activity. So in general, only a small sliver of the work you do will be visible and noticed, and I think a staffer is kidding themselves if they believe they know the full extent of anyone else's contributions, or if they are involved in problematic behavior, how far that goes. This makes it very, very, very easy for an awful lot of people who are receiving basically equal staff attention, to think the distribution is extremely unfair. It also makes it very, very, very easy to -give- an unfair distribution. It is likely for people not even remotely involved in the game, with not even the smallest bit of context, to shit talk you on your efforts and your choices there. They are doing so because they have spent years and years in the hobby, and desperately need to believe that gives them the experience to speak from a lofty perch and validate that time, even if they have been doing things hilariously wrong for that entire time period. Some people give good advice, but also bear in mind that it is very unlikely anyone giving you advice has kept a game running for more than a year or so. So yeah.

Second, the largest criteria you should judge anyone, player or staff, is by how well they handle situations that go wrong. How they deal with frustration, how well they deal with RP shut down, how well they handle a conflict with a player they don't click with, how well they handle someone else losing their temper at them, how short their own temper is, and so on. It doesn't matter a damn how nice and positive someone is when everything is going their way- most people are. All that matters is how positive a member of the community they can be when they aren't. Know that everyone will also judge you by how you deal with them based on how that person is when everything is positive and great, except if they have had personally bad experiences for it. This means staff are loathe to punish anyone that they have not -personally- had bad experiences with, and you will pretty much never, ever be lauded for protecting anyone from abuse unless other people have personally experienced that abuse. Since this is a creative hobby, and most people aren't exactly super creative and driven to create things when a ton of people who have no idea what is going on are calling them worse than Hitler, it isn't exactly a surprise that most games collapse as soon as the initial honeymoon period is done. I'd say depending on how things go, you'll have maybe 2-3 months. I lucked out imo by getting a longer period since I think original theme and interest in something much different gave me some more time- I thought I'd have the kind of rants like a month or two before I did. But I mean, someone is kidding themselves if they think it won't happen unless you keep the game tiny and with a super small circle of people you all know. Like, I also don't think there's anything -wrong- with a game only lasting during the honeymoon period when everyone is super hyped about it. As long as people have fun, it was a success. But if you wanna make something longer than that, I'd be prepared for how people will act when they start to lose interest, begin to feel bored, get frustrated with their stories and need someone else to blame for that- that'll be you.

And it really is you. Whether the game succeeds by your own metrics will just be how passionate you are and how much time and energy you are willing to invest, how long you can sustain it, and how many like minded players and staff will share that vision, but also be willing to be reasonable when things go in a way they dislike. Building a game is not that hard and honestly a lot of fun, everyone is hyped to be working together to create things, and it is easy for disagreements to be brushed over when everyone is having fun. You just either have to be prepared for when that easy part ends, or make your peace with not going past that point- if you stop there, no shame in that. Long as you and everyone else had fun.

@Lisse24 said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:

Also, if we're remembering a previous person saying that you can usually only get 1 or 2 people to run PRPs and Arx is looking at that volume of PRPs being run, well, that's more than 1 or 2 people. I'd love to hear @Apos's view on what's going right there. Obviously, some of that is going to be just volume of players, Arx is a big game, but what else is contributing to the wealth of plots?

Well it's an interesting question there, since I'm with @sparks as well in being taken back by the numbers and there always being more than I expect. Like I was floored that we are approaching 5000 +firstimpressions made, and even with us deleting messengers past 30, we have 30361 message objects currently. So I think there's always a lot more activity than anyone would expect, as long as the environment encourages people to be proactive and fosters and rewards positive behavior that generates RP for other people.

And I think that point there is super critical. Like I've never played BSG:U but I think it's very telling how highly everyone that plays it speaks of the game, and it's by all indications a standout game, and from my impression it sounds in large part because it has an outstanding environment that again fosters RP. The scales are different, and I think smaller games tend to have much better environments because of how much personalized effort that can be given that makes people feel really a part of things. My goal on Arx was to try to get as close as I could to that even if we grew larger than I planned for, once it became extremely clear I wasn't gonna have a 20-30 person game. I feel like I cheat by abusing Tehom's saintlike nature in creating code that lets me automate the boring things that would be required in giving people the tools to mimic that as close as I can.

Which takes us back to the original point of the thread. A big take away is that games are extremely susceptible to shifts in environment, because as a collaborative creative hobby, it's really about how motivated everyone involved is in creating. And like, if you set up an environment where everyone is waiting on everyone else to do something, it's going to fail. Or if an environment is created where there's pushback anytime someone tries to do something fun, or create RP for anyone else, it'll fail. Or if staff that drive story get burnt out from dealing with people that treat them as adversaries, it'll fail. Like I get super pissed at threads when I see people shitting on other's plans for making a game- it's super easy to be a negative nancy that does that, and it's -really- hard to be someone that keeps their motivation through it. It's also why I get really annoyed if I see anyone being a dick to @faraday or @sonder or other game runners even if I'm not playing a game with them and it's unlikely I ever will - like christ, what they're doing is -really- hard, and it's like nothing short of a miracle that some of those good game runners read that shit and keep their motivation through it. You would think people that want games would stop making it harder on people to run them and be successful at them.

ANYWAYS. Climbing down from that soapbox, and going back to the question, it really just comes down to the environment. If you give people the tools, and reward them, and make them feel like a part of the story for doing it, they are going to go nuts with it.

For the handful of people that know me and have fallen out of touch:

Last Ojitar @ Firan
Last Furen @ Firan
Judante @ Firan
Declan @ The Reach

and now since it's about to start beta:
Apostate @ Arx

Credit to @faraday for making me think of this. Immersion as a subject is something I've had a lot of difficulty putting a finger on, because it seems to mean very different things to different individuals, and it can be hard to even describe why something feels immersive to the point it is impossible for a game owner that isn't into that stuff to know what anyone is talking about.

Now people can talk about individual features they found immersive or what they like, but that still leaves a dev just picking from a really wide scattershot of confusing things and asking, 'why on earth do people love this IC messenger thing that is basically functionally identical to @mail' and even the people that like it can have a difficult time articulating why. I think it's worthwhile to take a shot at that, because it lets owners put in easy to implement tools that aren't disruptive to their own design philosophy and are nowhere near as manpower intensive as things that would need them to radically alter their games from things they do like.

So I've noticed people have really different comfort levels in RP areas that come up all the time on here, but aren't usually articulated as the actual issues. This is stuff that I think causes a lot of fights when people are really different in what they like. I'll start with one, ambiguity.

Ambiguity: People vary wildly in how much of a setup or how much contextual clues they expect to have, and more importantly, how much ambiguity they enjoy dealing with in their rp. This comes up all the time. Take part of a set that includes, "Two people are fighting at the bar." Some people wouldn't blink at this. It doesn't matter, it's a minor detail, they ignore it. Some people would be driven crazy by it.

Not having the contextual clues and information that their character would possess that would inform their decision making usually means one of four things happen for players that care:

1. They ask oocly for clarification. "Did my character see who started it? What are they fighting over? Is one bullying the other? What do they look like?" All things that would inform their decisions and character actions. They break character to ask.
2. They roll with it, and make a guess, even if they know it might be inaccurate for their character. "Well, I guess I'll break up the fight, and assume that it was truly violent and not an argument, since my character wouldn't want someone to get really hurt." And they don't break character to do this, even if it's jarring for them since it could result in their character acting in a way contrary to how they are.
3. They don't respond at all, even if it's something their character might respond to, because they don't want to take the risk of doing something jarringly out of character due to a lack of information. Like #2 this doesn't break character, but it's still jarring because they don't have context.
4. They make up the details themselves. This comes across as twinking or godmoding, so isn't normally done, but it's common in other RP formats when little detail is provided and people are expected to build on it.

Now this isn't often a case of bad writing or anything like that, but two players having different expectations of what they should be giving each other to work with. Someone that's more immersion focused I think expects others to give them context that is sufficient for them to build on and run with, without the need for asking questions or clarification, and expects to do the same for others. Other people that don't mind ambiguity, see that as totally unnecessary, because hey we're all writers and if something is confusing, just ask.

Now where immersion really comes into play here, is when the game is the one to reduce that ambiguity and give the player more context. Now the most extreme example of this are RPI MUDs. I had been RPing on MUs for a few years and I had never heard the term 'set' for 'setting a scene' until I tried the Reach. That might sound outlandish and bizarre to someone that's only RP'd in MUSHes, but the reason is simple, in that all the context is provided by the game and the environment they cultivate. Understand, I'm not advocating that at all, but I think it's important to understand the stylistic differences in storytelling. Basically in something like those MUDs, context is incredibly narrowly defined. Painfully narrow. Any action of characters must have some coded response which shows. If characters are injured, they display injuries when looked at. Everything the characters are wearing or carrying has a coded equivalent. Everything in the room has emits or something responsive. There's no context outside of what is coded, so this also means anytime someone enters a room, they have the context they need to immediately roleplay, which makes sets unnecessary.

Now obviously we all play MUSHes, not MUDs, but we should know that the more freeform nature comes at a tradeoff of ambiguity. We use that to tell more powerful stories that aren't limited by code, but it does mean that for some players, it would be very helpful to provide more context to them from the game. So as an example, let's look at IC messengers versus @mail or page.

Functionally, they should be identical, but here's some important differences, forgive me for the general variations from game to game:

Mail:
TO: Stella
FROM: Bob
Subject: Hey we should meet
When are you next free? Please hit me up.

Messenger:
Stella's wrist communicator lights up, signifying a new message.
From Commander Robert, to Ensign Stella, sent at 10:37 am yesterday, IC time.
"When are you next free? Please hit me up."

Okay so the content is identical, but the context is different. For the mail, does the player of Stella have any idea whether that is IC or OOC, and whether they should respond ICly or OOCly? Probably not. It would be likely decided by the environment of the game, but what if she's new? All those two little lines around the functionally identical messenger does is provide context immersion. Some players absolutely would not care, some would eat it up, particularly for some because it's one less thing for them to worry about. They do not need to seek clarification, they can just RP immediately. Which is what a lot of them want.

There's a ton more to it, but this is getting long, so I think I'll get into other parts later.

@cobaltasaurus said in Arx on github:

It’s really tempting to grab this and run (as it is I have some stuff I do want to take I just haven’t had a chance to install more than basic code), but I’ve been a little bit worried about seeming to be an “Arx clone” if we went with the same diceroller / system stuff even with changes we’d need to make for our particular thematics.

I mean it's never going to be fun to have some person who denigrates your work dismiss it in some way, and I can really understand wanting to avoid them, but I think it's very important to try to separate yourself from unfair criticisms as much as possible. If you think it would help you at all to do it, then I would. There's never going to be any winning in trying to placate the negative influences on the hobby, and trying means no one will ever do anything.

I'd just go through the code and identify, 'this is stuff I'd replace' and consider commenting it out, so you don't get to a spot where you are trying to create complex data migrations due to things being stored in the database using existing stuff you think doesn't fit your game. Otherwise, why not? Learning how to change a lot of the stuff to work in a way you want might be one of the best ways to learn Python, as you get practical experience in fixing things.

So back on another game, there was one guy who was a paramedic irl and every once in a while during the middle of a scene he'd make up some excuse and say he had to afk for a minute or two. He'd come back, and then almost immediately start to become less and less coherent in the most hilarious of ways and pick fights with everyone and just lose his mind. Flowing prose to being able to barely type in a couple minutes flat. Overpowering drug addictions, while sad, do make for very very memorable MU experiences.

Apropos of nothing.

@Kestrel I apologize that you found @coin's apology to be insincere.

@tempest said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

MUSHes are reliant on the players being excited to help BUILD the game, create stories, etc. That excitement is pretty hard to bottle up and extract, and is needlessly wasted by these posts about "we're gonna open an XYZ game in 6 months", IMO.

I mean, you're right that MUSHes are reliant on everyone collaborating and generating content, and it's very reliant on everyone's enthusiasm, but I really don't think talking about it is wasting energy or hype or whatever. I personally think that stuff is a little overstated. Yeah it might get people to have a look at a webpage, but let's be real, people telling their friends what a blast they are having with storylines is what gets people to invest that time way more consistently. If someone logs in and they get pulled into RP and have fun, they probably stick around, while if they get crickets in an OOC room except for a douchebag bragging about their character, they don't. A wave of hype helps create the former but it doesn't sustain itself that great since it's super fragile to rely on a bunch of people entertaining each other without a core that keeps it going.

I mean the big danger of the hype thing is someone logs in, makes a character, and then doesn't find RP or has a bad experience that sours them. Then they aren't going to come back again unless their friends tell them it's better or whatever.

@Runescryer said in High Fantasy:

@Thenomain said in High Fantasy:

@Runescryer said in High Fantasy:

@Thenomain said in High Fantasy:

@Runescryer

I guess being in the minority, I want to build or play a game I would enjoy, not one with the widest appeal. If they are the same thing, then cool. If not, so what?

I agree 100% with that. We (mostly) don't do this hobby of Role Playing (in all of it's forms) for money or prestige; we do it because it's fun for us. If there's no fun, why bother? Now, there's as many definitions of fun as there are people, granted, but if you find others who are having fun alongside you, that makes it all the better.

Well, let's be honest; a game without other people enjoying it with us is not very fun. I have been involved in enough of those projects that I would, myself, rather a game that appeals to more people even if it means compromising some of my own wants, because I know the pay-off can be absolutely worth it.

Having a game with too many players because you've compromised too much can also be a bad thing. Just saying

It's finding the Goldielocks Zone: ideally everything is just right.

The biggest example of that imo is being unwilling to enforce standards that would keep the game you want, and that starts a slide into directions that alienates the player base you are trying to appeal to. This is something that will happen naturally unless staff are willing to be firm, because people will see elements of a game they enjoy, play it, but violently disagree with an element that is prohibited, and just do it anyway. For staff, it's not fun to be the bad guy and shut people down, even if what they are shutting down will make the environment dramatically worse and make a ton of players leave. This means problematic behavior might just go unchecked way too long.

Allowing elements that are extremely incompatible with one another can work in the short term to balloon numbers but it will create an increasingly fragile edifice that will eventually collapse as players have a slow build of resentment that will eventually boil over.

@brent We see what you did there and upvoted anyways.

@lotherio said in Alternative Formats to MU:

In some ways I feel the barrier to entry was what sort of what got us at least near in terms of preference of play as MU'ers with each other somehow? I don't know though. Literally, that one barrier: read the text on the screen. From 'create guest' and 'type 'help' for help', one can learn everything right there by just taking a couple minutes to read. Does everyone but us have short attention spans and won't read the text or skim it or tl;dr tell me how to play now please? Are we trying to take out a lot of the reading part to learn to play to draw in better writers?

I'm of two minds.

First, let's be elitist for a second. Numbers, in and of themselves, are not helpful to a MU at all. If a MU is a collaborative game, where everyone involved is essentially a writer creating content, then there are going to be people who even if aren't malicious, are not net positives for a game. I've had a number of apps from people that clearly couldn't speak English at all or were completely unable to understand theme. It sounds mean to say that we shouldn't help them, but if I approved them and let them play, and well meaning players spent hours and hours out of their day trying to help those guys instead of having fun themselves, it could potentially drive off the most proactive, positive people on a game for very little return. So I haven't exactly been in a huge rush to smooth out some of the barriers for entry because we don't have the support structure available to handle people that would need that kind of help in order to be a net positive for the game environment.

Now let's not be elitist. It would be a mistake to think of those other formats whether it's google docs, discord, any of a million chat programs and the like all being strictly inferior to MUs. It's telling that they are all more popular, and there's strong reasons why. We can capture the features that make things vastly more convenient and easier to use without necessarily compromising the game environments that could be easily disrupted by opening floodgates.

@arkandel I believe it helps a game if the game is designed to reward the behavior that helps cultivate the kind of environment that the owners want to see.

Sure, it doesn't have to. Players can do the same kind of behavior regardless. But I think it makes for a much more consistent buy in, and this is important because negative experience tend to greatly outweigh positive ones for players.

@TimmyZ said in Eliminating social stats:

A number of earlier 'games', especially Mushes, had no stats. It was all social story telling. It's where the concept, very common on comic mu*s, came from; Take turns in the spotlight, or take your losses let others win sometimes.

I'm sad that all mu*s have this relegation to 'game' and required 'stats' these days.

I'm relatively new to MUs and did full consent systemless type RP for years. I think they are fun and I enjoy them. But I think it's much more difficult to make an extremely large, coherent world with heavy continuity without any kind of systems that can be used to arbitrate disputes and define the abstract.

@derp said in RL Anger:

Do we think that rapists don't know that rape is bad? Or that putting a headline in a newspaper somewhere between 'Hey, it would be super nice if...' and 'Knock it the fuck off...' is gonna somehow deter them from doing so?

I mean, there's not an insignificant percentage of dudes that think that unless someone is holding a screaming person down by knife point, it doesn't count. We aren't exactly that far away from a congressman talking about 'legitimate rape'. There's a whole lot of people that think a drunk person flirting with them and seeming to be okay with something at first isn't raping them, and I mean, it just is.

So yeah, actually. A lot of rapists don't know rape is bad.