@sunnyj Simple enough to not disrupt the flow of the scene, easy enough that people feel like using it as a fun tool to add context to scenes, but complicated enough to fit the needs to remove handwaving and complete abstraction that undermines scarcity or the ability of people to avoid consequences/ignore theme in problematic ways.
@brent Yeah, it is. Just use 'idle' or even nick it to @@
@seraphim73 said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
I think that the debate @Apos is having with @surreality an @faraday comes down to the differences between sci-fi worlds and fantasy worlds (someone already made much of this point, and I apologize for missing who it was): You can tell someone that your world is low-magic feudal fantasy and they can play in it while you hash out the details; you can't tell someone that your world is high-tech meritocratic space exploration and let them play in it while you hash out the details.
Like I get that and I'm not trying to diminish the challenges in it, but I just don't think that's true. Star Wars, Dune, Warhammer 40k, Fading Suns, imo all of those could fall under the fantasy umbrella even so. But also take any near future sci fi, cyberpunk and so on, all of those also are also minimized and simple too, so imo you are pretty much just left with sci fi settings trying to define something completely alien.
And even there, I still don't agree. A creator just doesn't have to chase down all the rabbit holes. They could start with a dozen different character broad tropes, define really what they'd need to know in order to pursue the meaningful storylines to them, and then focus only on anything absolutely critical to their experiences as they occur. It just needs immense discipline on what someone is willing to invest time in or not.
I just don't think the genre matters nearly as much as people think it does. You can feel I'm way off the mark or incorrect about that, but I just do not think the underlying principles are that different, just how someone meaningfully invests their time creating it.
@surreality Yeah I understand that's the problem but I just disagree. I don't think that target audience just matters very much, and people only become convinced they matter because of how loud they are. I believe the amount of people that a game would lose is eclipsed by those a game would gain by focusing on story, and if the OT game creator does so then they gain enough time to complete the setting to the satisfaction of those that would be demanding.I think people are distracted by the loudest critics without seeing those that would support the game that do not require that degree of rigor. A game designer trying to appeal to those ultra demanding diehards is imo a terrible idea because it is not an effective use of their time, when they can make their game successful by using their time to focus on other avenues of appeal.
In other words- An OT game with the feel of a babylon 5 game can gain a Star Trek's internal consistency with enough time, but it should start story rich because that's just a stronger way to build a game's base. I think trying to present a full canon of a Star Trek's detail when beginning is not an effective use of resources.
@surreality said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
ETA: Also, people have really unrealistic expectations re: the time required to create a truly quality game. An OT game is always going to take longer than almost anything based on an existing property, whether it's using an original system as well or not.
Yeah but that's all I'm getting at. That I think the trap most OT designers fall into is trying to answer every question asked of them, and that's unrealistic and not an effective use of their time. And most want to try to answer every possible thing before they get going, and it really just needs to focus on the broadest strokes or it is not a realistic goal. If someone says, 'I'm going to have a fully fleshed out sci fi setting that answers most questions before I get going', I'd feel the same way about someone saying, 'I'm going to establish my original theme setting with a 10 novel series first'. If someone can do that, I have all the respect in the world for them, but I would not advocate that approach.
I believe that the lack of sci fi games is because of people having unrealistic expectations and standards of what they can reasonably achieve.
@surreality No, that's not even close to the methodology I was talking about. There's a huge difference between, 'deny data to create a craving' and 'you want to give that data but you do not have time to do so, and if you try to do so your game will crash because you are neglecting more important things.'
People fail at sci fi because they are like, 'hold up ya'll, I can't tell stories for these 50 people, because I need to tell one person how a transporter works.' Sure, they don't think of it that way, but it is absolutely how it works in practice when they spend 5 hours talking to a single person.
@faraday said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
@apos said in Sci Fi/Opera Originality:
People are used to approaching things as the protagonist of the story, and sci fi is pretty steeped in discovery, so they want to be the one to do that, and it is impossible to do that for a full player base.
That is exactly the sort of thing I'm getting at as to why original sci-fi settings are so hard. Players want to do this. Sure you can try to fight it but you're swimming upstream. Good luck with that.
I think you're saying that, 'Unless you are willing to accommodate that, a sci fi game will not be successful because it will alienate its fans.' And I'm actually saying the opposite. 'If you -try- to accommodate that, your game will fail. It can only be successful if you are willing to alienate them.'
Anyone wanting to run a sci fi game with an original theme has to be incredibly disciplined in how they approach knowledge because it is a rabbit hole that they might never escape from. They have to be able to be strict when separating the elements they need to get across. They need to be able to divide up fundamental baseline elements that every character must know, from those that are roleplay critical for one person or small group to move a story forward, from those critical for one person, to those that would be nice to know and add flavor to headcanon but are irrelevant for many people in their every day RP.
People creating a game are excited about that setting and they will naturally -want- to answer every question. They should not do this. There will always be more questions than there is time to answer, and they need to approach it in a disciplined way or else their time is going to be dominated by a handful of very curious individuals and their game will fail because they don't make enough story to appeal to people that are less demanding.
It's really about buying time. Someone wanting to make an original theme game has to have it be fun so people are RPing and entertaining one another, so then they get the time necessary to answer the questions that flesh out the world. If they try to do it at the start, they will never, ever get the time, and the people that would be creating activity will drift off, and the people they massively invested in on a personal level will have nothing to do and also leave. So trying to answer all of Engineer Bob's questions about how the warp core actually works before they have vibrant story going is going to destroy their game. And Bob might quit, and that's too bad, but more reasonable Engineer Phil will be okay with getting the answers in 3 or 4 months when things are more stable.
Like, I wrote for the better part of a year before starting Arx. Fantasy games are under much less scrutiny than sci fi, sure. But all told, that was what, maybe novelette length worth in lore? Now there is well up into the thousands of pages, and it's still mostly from me, but it's about buying yourself the time to do that. And it cannot be done by trying to accommodate the neediest people that aren't in turn entertaining others.
@faraday It's impossible to satisfy those guys unless you are their personal GM that doesn't do anything but sit on their shoulder and answer their questions as they go through the setting, though. And while that sounds like hyperbole, I do not believe it is. People are used to approaching things as the protagonist of the story, and sci fi is pretty steeped in discovery, so they want to be the one to do that, and it is impossible to do that for a full player base. If a question isn't really applicable to most of the characters, I just don't think it should be answered at length. If it is applicable to every character, then sure answer it publicly in a way that prevents repetition and the setting gets more fleshed out as questions that apply to everyone come out.
@faraday Nah man I really think people just are making it hard because of the burning need to explain in exhaustive detail. You can break down different economies into trope approaches too. You can say post-apocalyptic barter, you can say utopian without any effective economy due to needs all being practically met, you can say bladerunner dystopian. People are familiar with the genres of sci fi, if you are making a grimdark warhammer 40k esqe game, they'll get from the get go that it's not utopian. So keep it to broad themes and address questions as necessary.
I think people picture that I'm blithely waving off the questions people will ask. I'm not though. I'm saying most just aren't story critical, and and are generally going to be people having a burning desire to know everything about a setting so they can make their head canon click.
I know what people demand. That they want extremely exhaustive answers on how everything works so they can tell their own compelling stories in the setting. I know that if you say, 'Well that's a transporter' that people are going to ask 800 questions on what a transporter is, and exhaustively ask at length why you can or can't use it to create new life or rebuild anything else at the molecular level or a million other things. I get that every engineer character is going to feel they need to know all those.
What I'm saying is it's wrong for a game creator to try to answer them. That it's a mistake to do so.
I think that you should only go very slightly past the knowledge that any general character would have access to. Just a little bit. A few paragraphs at most. You absolutely will never, ever get started if you try to exhaustively define every aspect of the setting. Let me put it another way:
Sure, you'll have phasers or blasters or laser cannons or whatever in the setting. You really don't need to define them past a sentence or two that amounts to 'pew pew'. That's it. If you make other races, and have diplomat characters, you can't write 300 or 400 pages on the hundreds of years of history between the different aliens, and their cultures. There is never going to be a point where you are 'done' there. If you are drawn into rabbit holes away from the baselines, it will never get done, and no one will ever be able to RP in the setting.
Yes, of course I know people have way different demands for sci fi and fantasy. I'm saying it's a mistake for a game designer to try to -meet- those demands initially. It is impossible to do so. And imo the reason why almost no sci fi original theme games exist is because the designers, excited about their settings, want to try to do so. Don't. Say as much as you need, and nothing more.
@surreality There's pacing though. Like take the first episode of any sci fi series or the first hundred pages of a sci fi novel. It doesn't have to all be there from the get go, and I think people want to answer every possible question before they get going and that cripples their ability to get going at all.
Sci fi differs because intrinsic to the setting people want to very clearly illustrate how it's different from the real world. You do that, but in measured strokes or else you will drown in it.
Edit to add: Imo people wanna say, 'Here's a setting I'm making, and I can tell stories in it', when they need to approach it from, 'Here's stories I wanna tell, and this is a setting I can set those in.'
@emda The temptation of anyone creating their own theme is trying to tell everything about it all at once. People make a setting. They are understandably excited about the setting. They want to share their excitement.
Can't do it. Need to approach it from what's important, and fill in details as they are asked. Yes, someone will desperately want to know whatever excruciatingly minor pedantic detail they obsess over and there's a million of those but have to focus on what are the core story elements, even if a huge percentage of that will be hidden and just slowly come out as the stories are told.
So I did make an original theme game, but I did that knowing the challenges implicit in that. It's really on someone making an original theme game to create a setting that's intuitive and approachable enough, and fun and engaging enough, that people want to learn it and stick around and roleplay in it. That needs an awful lot of drive on the part of the creator since people are very protective of their limited free time, and really don't want to pour help into a project that might turn out to be vaporware, so basically it's on the designer to create something engaging, and then make something fun enough on their own that a critical mass of people enjoy it enough to learn it and then start telling their own stories and generating activity on their own.
Like to be brutally honest, theme almost doesn't matter all that much in the big scheme of things. The overwhelming majority of us have probably RP'd in a wide range of settings. The initial experience of, 'Did I have fun RP when I logged in', that's pretty much all that matters whether something catches on, and theme is just a subset of that. A game runner that's super active and tells fun stories will probably make anything work all right.
@bronn said in Armageddon MUD:
The truth is in @ShaLeah 's latest statement. The game is an exclusive club, and survival of the fittest reigns. They want players who are willing to lose while they get to have fun.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But games internal philosophies are going to wildly diverge when you have someone that's chill and wants more players to pop in and has a collaborative mindset (like @ThugHeaven probably from her posts) and then you have dudes that are clinging to an original, 'roar I survived the worst shit thrown at me and now everyone should, sink or swim newbs' competitive mindset.
So yea those two are pretty hard to reconcile, and if you're like, 'well, newbs should have to learn that like I did', that's okay, but that's definitely a competitive design choice and that is making the game way more niche and that does mean anyone with ooc knowledge of how the game works has a huge edge on someone new coming in that does have a competitive mindset. Again, if you wanna do that, it's fine if you do, but yeah of course that's going to be a huge turnoff to most people. The more game-like, mechanical aspects are going to be dominated by people that understand it the best and can use it to their advantage, which is true for every game, but if it has a more competitive bent it's going to be a whole hell of a lot less newbie friendly since unless you specifically create safeguards, you're pretty much relying on every single player to oocly play nice.
And for someone that has a more collaborative approach, working within that framework is a little swimming upstream. Sure, if a new player interacts with them personally, they'll probably have a positive first impression and be more likely to stick around, but the odds of that aren't great. Remember how the first MMOs had no tutorials? Notice how they all do now, with specifically designed newbie garden areas? Yeah. There's a reason for that, and it's not because gamers got worse. And if you are relying on people to find out things on their own and specifically limiting ooc contact in order to keep immersion, giving intuitive tools for them to do so is going to be an extremely large factor in how many stay or not. The really competitive mindsets will see that weedout as a good thing, whether you agree or not really just depends on your goals for the game.
@emmahsue said in Freelance NPC Offer:
Mz. Cupcake: If I can play it when needed/wanted by others and not have to dive deep on Making Things Happen Myself, it can be done. It's the energy required to get MU-players to act that sounds so immensely tiring right now.
I've been the active one, and I'm not in that headspace atm.
ES
To be honest, this is why I push so hard for organic RP and made sure the environment was set up to foster it, because it has a way lower obligations and people can feel free to just jump on and wander into scenes, basically.
@fortydeuce Ah, code requests would go at an entirely different scale yeah, since some of those might be, 'Yeah we'll probably look at that after X, Y, and Z systems are done, which will likely be in a year and a half.'
@insomnia said in Games that are active overnight?:
@cobaltasaurus I'm sorry I didn't get fired sooner!
I dunno, how fast do they do jobs on Arx? >.>
Hm, all things being relative. Apps usually overnight at most. Investigations we keep up with okay. Simple jobs usually as soon as I see them. Some of the complex things probably not as fast as I'd like, due to the sheer volume with like 350 active players and a thousand characters or so, but I think the oldest jobs are like a couple weeks old. I think we do okay, but we're always trying to add more automation and streamline things in places to improve turn around time.
Been probably ten years since I took a bartle test, so did it again and got:
93% Achiever
47% Explorer
33% Socializer
27% Killer
I vaguely remember having 100% achiever when I was younger and no killer at all, so maybe I'm getting meaner in my old age, I have no idea.
@lithium said in Internet Attacks? Why?:
But... does that really apply to MU*'s? Our anger and such tends to take a lot longer to build up to the point of ostracism. We are a lot more tolerant than most online gamers (see league of legends and dota for extreme examples) probably due to the media in which we use, text is slow, it's patient, it gives us time to think and respond.
Curious as to people's thoughts.
I don't think people are all that different, but MUs need a vastly different level of investment than someone playing LoL or Dota. I mean someone gets into a LoL game, they play with 4 strangers for maybe 20 minutes, they never see them again. For us, someone gets onto a new game, they could be interacting with some of those people for literally years, and even though it's anonymous, anonymity means a hell of a lot less when the reputation attached to a character basically effects how you can play for thousands of hours invested. So we have a lot of mini society pushback, where people though they are anonymous from a RL perspective for one another, care a whole lot about their 'anonymous' personas on here enough to practice a lot better behavior generally.
I know there's a temptation to be like, 'kids these days' about that but I just don't really think that's the case. I think it's just people generally know that even if it's a fake internet name of a character or board handle, they are attached to that, and their investment heavily helps reduce the really egregious examples we see in games with zero investment.
I care about tempo proportionally to the scene, and what's the scene about. I think of it as part of mood. There's a huge difference between characters bantering or scenes with a lot of gravitas, and I'd just want everyone on the same page there.
I don't enjoy scenes with strict pose order. I honestly can't think of one I did. I can do them, but they always feel like work to me. Always just meeting obligations. I'll do it if invited but I would never seek it out, and would prefer to not do any RP scene like that.
