I think anything that's very episodic in feel has some issues translating to MUs, since it takes a lot of work to make an environment that can sustain itself between episodes that highlight the kind of high adventure vibe you want to capture. Tabletop and other RP environments don't have to deal with that since there -isn't- a persistent environment. Every game deals with that a little but if high adventure is the selling point, it's disproportionately represented compared to other games.
@Lotherio The end of Inglorious Basterds was a historical WW2 MU where staff totally did not care about keeping the metaplot immutable.
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.
Answer will vary by every single player, including what plots they want. A lot of those will be problems that cannot be solved.
Some really just want a sandbox to tell their own stories, and will resent anything to the contrary like a nudge to be involved when they really just want autonomy. Some want to world build, whether that's inherently contradictory with anything you made because they don't have the ability to make their own game that's successful to their standards. Some want involvement in plots on a deeply personal level, but also will resent any plots they aren't part of, even if they know that's unreasonable especially if they don't have high playtime. Some want community wide recognition of their efforts and accomplishments, and not see the same thing happen to other people enough where they feel that recognition is devalued. Some are deeply committed to a personal narrative, and will be furious at anyone, player or staff alike, that interferes with what they already have written in their head. It all just depends.
In general, most people want something effortless to join and be involved with in a significant way, fun and entertaining while involved, and that confers no obligations at all to them. That's not sustainable past a point so my advice is to build around the people that are willing to do some work for other people, generally.
@Thenomain Doesn't happen as much on games with coded money and any feeling of resource scarcity. It's a symptom of money feeling meaningless, and the largest reason for that is because it's not coded so no character feels the need to RP not having access to it when they need it. I think not having coded money is analogous to not having any way of showing someone taking damage. In full consent games without systems, sure people will pose getting hurt. How hurt are they? Shrug, there's a lot of dumb ways to track it, but the equivalent of saying, 'well okay since there's bad systems for tracking damage, we should handwave it and go without' creates way, way more problems than people think.
@Misadventure Considering they post at length about their experience on MUs, and mostly how they get kicked off for being disruptive, unfortunately yes.
@Three-Eyed-Crow Nah it's simpler than that. Those are ones interested in the hobby, but steadfastly hold to two principles: a) they should be able to say whatever they want, whenever they want, without any consequences whatsoever. b) no one should be able to do the same thing to them.
@tragedyjones You can't escape it though whenever you tie something subjective like, 'they have an attractive appearance' to a stat. There's objective physical characteristics, but whether those are considered attractive is subjective, which is why Theno was able to call Lithium a dirty fatshaming horrible person by implication, even if he acted obtuse about doing it. So like, if a player has a skin condition or Proteus syndrome at the tabletop and is really sensitive about it, I also wouldn't want to be the asshole to say that orcs are considered hella ugly because of their skin and how their bone structure differs from commonly held societal standards of beauty. I mean sure it's true and we all know it's true but why even get into it?
@Thenomain I'm still going to hold that having any character statistic that can be interpreted in wildly different subjective ways based on the player is just bad design. Appearance is just a dumb stat.
@Pyrephox I agree about territory. I -have- played on games where there was specifically designated territory and moving into the wrong one would get a character killed. While implementations of this would vary and I wouldn't rule out someone having a good one that didn't suppress RP, I haven't yet -seen- it done in a way that didn't suppress RP and have a quelling effect on the game environment. It's pretty immersive but exceptionally newbie unfriendly and extremely difficult to implement in a way that's not destructive to RP.
@Sparks said in The Metaplot:
@Thenomain I think the problem Apos is referencing is when people either don't act on the responses to their requests or don't put in requests in the first place at all, then complain they aren't involved.
I think part of the problem is that people sometimes view "the staff is GM'ing a scene for me" as the only sort of involvement with metaplot that matters. Which is deeply unfortunate, because staff on most games doesn't have time to run complex GM'd scenes for everyone; requests and such are likely to give you the plot hooks to run with and involve others in order to get a plot to the point of group GM'd scenes.
Yeah @Sparks pretty well nails it. Like we have a lot of very shy, introverted people in the hobby. To a degree we have to be built around that, with reaching out to them and giving them nudges and trying to give them a lot of low pressure ways to get involved. If those aren't taken, then you're at the point where any more outreach becomes downright intrusive. Sure, someone can find anything they get as insufficient, or they just don't care for it, or they don't like the story or any of a hundred reasons and that's fine, but I think if it's accessible fairly evenly to players across the board and at least a large segment find it engaging and fun, then it works. And for a larger game even if we had the time to reach out to the 1/6th or whatever that give it a hard pass, I dunno if it's a good idea to do it, since the answer might be, 'I just wanna RP with my one friend here, why are you bothering me'.
So I mean yeah make it as accessible as possible but after a point trying to get people involved becomes downright pushy and is fun for neither party and actively detrimental.
@mietze Yeah but if it's by degree. If you you have 300 active players that have logged in the past 30 days, and 250 put in jobs about something , and of that like 125 show up to plots about the responses to those jobs, I don't think it's unreasonable if like staff figure that the 50 that never respond aren't interested imo.
@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.
@Ominous said in The Metaplot:
This ties into xp bloat. "Oh, there is a metaplot? Well, why should I care, since superman will save the day anyways?" If one person has all the skills and stats to solve all of the problems, it's hard to create a plot that requires group effort. It's like playing the Pandemic board game but giving one of the players three of the role cards and four extra actions. You have to ask "Why are there other players in this game at this point?"
While I understand this to an extent, it's kind of mystifying to me. To me the idea of not being able to design stories for someone is so alien I just don't understand it. Sure they might be more difficult to challenge but unless a character is literally a bag of stats with no personality, goals or interests it really ain't that hard to make a narrative they'll find interesting.
From an administrative angle, what I've done is a bunch of internal tools to help sorting it. We keep track of all the private plot type notes for PCs and it has a searchable index with tags for a dozen different categories of special things about the characters, and then can cross reference with the plots they are involved in, all the story responses they've gotten, and so on. And we have an extra alert for any player that hasn't ever gotten any form of GMing, so we can keep weaving in new players.
@mietze Passive people deflecting the blame for a lack of effort on their behalf is the norm in the hobby, whether player or staff. There's just going to be a lot of finger pointing for who let a story die regardless.