@phase-face It might be helpful to think of what kind of role you see or other staffers filling, since that can kind of suggest the game you want. A head storyteller, where you are creating plot everyone can join in? An arbiter, where people are all making their own stories and you help curate them? And so on.
I think trying to think of how you want to spend your time running your game can help shape the game you want to create and how it plays.
RL is really, really tough for her right now. 2020 hit her over and over again in a dozen different ways. Talked just short of a month ago.
@TiredEwok said in Things Coded in Firan:
I thought there was something about having to go to the bathroom? Of course, I could be remembering incorrectly all together. It has been 17 years since I RPed there.
Probably thinking of bathing. There was code that described your character smelling as an added line on their desc based on how recently you bathed. This meant every character coming off the roster also stunk, iirc.
@SparklesTheClown said in Differences Between MUDs and Everything Else? (MUSHes, MUXes, etc):
@Apos said in Differences Between MUDs and Everything Else? (MUSHes, MUXes, etc):
b) Feeling that they are prevented by coded constraints from roleplaying about something they want to do. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be sanity checks and automatic thematic enforcement.
The idea of reward, immersion, and constraints is a pretty useful thing to think about. I absolutely despise eat/drink code and never thought they added to anything. But I think certain code that add to the narrative of the game is definitely useful. Sanity checks is definitely a good example. Having code that pushes narrative rather than hinders or limits people I think is the ideal nuance here.
One thing I can't overemphasize enough is how much variance there is here in what players find acceptable or not, it very much is a 'you cannot please everyone' thing. It can be really, really easy to kind of find yourself constantly chasing an implementation that pleases everyone when it doesn't really exist, so I'd focus on what you'd personally find the most fun in terms of sanity checks/thematic enforcement.
@SparklesTheClown said in Differences Between MUDs and Everything Else? (MUSHes, MUXes, etc):
Like, at what point in a game's design do you think an average MUSHer looks at a game and goes "that's too MUD for me"?
The places a MUSH player will opt are pretty simple but also very dependent on an individual.
a) Something coded in the game that they feel they have to deal with but do not enjoy. Ie, RPI having to eat/drink/sleep or required maintenance tasks.
b) Feeling that they are prevented by coded constraints from roleplaying about something they want to do. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be sanity checks and automatic thematic enforcement.
c) Feeling that code is removing their narrative autonomy over a character. In RPIS this is mostly automated actions.
I think the most effective trade offs are making interacting with the environment feel rewarding and responsive, and act as thematic reinforcement of what a character is really good at and what they are bad at in regards to the environment. But always making sure it stays true to the character and players aren't forced to handwave things away for narrative ease.
@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.
We're a hobby that feeds off the creative energy of everyone around us and waxes and wanes, and that's a fragile thing. A few lukewarm or bad attempts at trying to stir something up is enough to discourage an awful lot of people in the hobby, and that goes for a format with hundreds of thousands of roleplayers or ten.
Really all it comes down to is just a few things. Are people able to find roleplay they enjoy when they want it? Are they left alone while doing it? Are they able to draw on the creative energy of others and combine it with their own? Are they confident they'll be treated fairly? Are they confident that the stories they get invested in won't be ended capriciously before they are ready for them to end?
Some of these things benefit from a large playerbase, but a lot don't. Just energized and active other people.
@deathbird Tessa's still around on Arx on a couple of alts, that death was a non-con as I recall.
@Caractus your app is like "maybe we should bring back kink shaming"
can confirm, am old
@faraday said in The Fate of MUSHdom:
I like to see innovative ideas, but I don't think this is a sound proposition.
It's all well and good to say "advertise and get more players", but those players need to have somewhere to play, and those games need to be able to support the influx. MUSHes don't scale well, primarily due to limited staff bandwidth. You can't fix that by dumping a bunch of inexperienced new players into the mix.
Also the idea of onboarding new players is noble, but MUSHes are so very different. I question how effective it can really be at preparing people to play a real game.
Faraday's right on the money here. I struggle to support the players I currently have which are generally very familiar with MUs and comfortable being relatively self-sufficient. My game would not be able to handle it if I spammed like gigantic non-MU rp forums with ads and had several hundred brand new 'how do I MU?' type players show up. Pure sandboxes and MUDs can handle loads like that but most of the games talked about on here are not that, so it's pretty hard to do.
@SilentHills said in MU Things I Love:
probably some RP that's gonna make my char look crazier than a shithouse rat
mission accomplished
@Caryatid I legit think of this every time he comes up.
@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.
@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.
On the other hand, if I imagine a song, I can often hear it so vividly it can be difficult to tell if I'm listening to something for real or just imagining it, and I dunno how true that is for other people.
@peasoupling And I can understand how it would be useful! The details I was thinking of were very much so people could enjoy them, rather than something like, 'how far from point a to point b' and would effect the RP.
Yeah, I have aphantasia. It's interesting to me to look at the practical effects of it. Like when descing the grid for my game, almost all the room descs are extremely perfunctory descs of what the place looks like and then a long digression in lore, and it never occurred to me until recently that might be why.
Like there's an interesting conflict between people that are mindblind and others when I write a description and someone presses me for details. It feels exactly like someone telling a story, and then someone pushes them for completely extraneous things they never would have thought of. Like "what color is something" is a lot like a kid asking a parent telling a story and pressing them for details the parent hadn't thought of. "Exactly how old were the protagonist's parents, what was their birthday" -- details I'd never, ever think of because I just don't picture things so like "what color is it, how big is that, where exactly in the room is this located" never, ever occurs to me.
Funny enough, I always considered people going, "But what does this LOOK like" to be extremely anal and I just didn't care. ETA: In contrast, I actually really enjoy reading people's descs, but in RP I've been more drawn to people implying the mindset of a character, their motivations, emotional state, etc- it's much more immersive to me.
@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
@Roz said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
@peasoupling said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
@Groth said in Arx's Elevation Situation:
That doesn't need to be the cost at all. Even if baronies no longer exist as organisations, you're still perfectly capable of playing a poor member of a noble family and you could still be appointed the Baron of three pig herders and a horse if you want to without that needing to be an org.
Wait, can you play a Baron without there being an actual baron-level org? Is that an actual thing? I don't know, I'm asking.
It's not an actual thing in the current structure. Groth is suggesting the structure could be changed.
Oh! That should reduce staff workload, at least. Since you're typically already in the higher-ranking orgs as well, I'm not sure what the overall effect would be besides that.
I dunno if it would reduce it. The problem with things like, "we'll just handwave it, we don't need to get the mechanical background for it" is the moment that stuff comes up, it's worse than as if we hadn't done it before and means I need to retroactively add it all or the player is just told they can't do what their character really should be able to do. It would be a lot like if someone is told they are a powerful merchant family, but we'll just handwave their income since no need to really do it. Then they want to spend money later for a plot, so we're trying to determine how much that is compared to other people, and invent a lot of numbers. It can just introduce a lot of problems of ambiguity that don't exist if it's already defined mechanically.
So my opinion on this changed a good bit while running Arx. I think @Ghost and others feel that game runners are disingenuous when we say we don't feel in competition because people mostly just play one main game so clearly we must be competing for players. But that misunderstands how a ton of people play games, especially the people that just have one game at one time.
So MUSHes, as we all know, are all about storytelling. But people's engagement, what they are excited about, these are all cyclical- they go in periods where they are excited about it, where they burn out, where they need a change of pace, where they get excited about doing another story. Most games that don't account for that even have a life cycle themselves where they have new stories people get excited about, but don't deviate from that so people's interest wanders.
What happens with more games I find is people are just more likely to stick in the hobby and eventually return to one game or another as their interest waxes and wanes. This definitely is not true for everyone, but it's true for a lot of people. What more games are doing is usually not stealing players from one another, but giving them a place to get over burnout and stay in the hobby.
