Posts made by Apos

@Lisse24 said in The Metaplot:

I'm all for creating a continuous and interconnected world where players actions matter, however I believe that plot should be driven from the ground up, and derive from how players interact with the world and complications set in front of them, rather than the top down.

Yeah I agree and I intentionally structured things that way when I designed it but plot is always going to go to the most proactive players that are put in a lot of effort to get involved. Like if you reach out aggressively to the more passive players that effort can be seen as intrusive and unwelcome so it pretty much has to be that way, just presented as an option to involvement if they show interest. The, 'I'm not going to do any work whatsoever and just complain I'm not being involved' is pretty pervasive, in part because there's a lot of good hearted people that will reach out to the complainers even if their complaints have no merit at all. I personally think enabling that behavior is a pretty bad idea, since it taxes the more proactive people that create for the game.

I think just rephrasing the question makes it self answering. When someone asks what a metaplot is, and it's defined as, 'overarching storyline that binds together events in the official continuity', then I think it just becomes, 'do you need an official continuity?' And the answer to that is, 'I want to run a sandbox where people make their own fun' and one is unimportant or, 'I want all the stories bound together' and one can be very important. I think the metaplot question almost can't be separated from, 'do you want a sandbox or an interconnected world?'

Sandbox is used as a perjorative and I think that's stupid and mostly just done by people that would never really be able to run a non-sandbox themselves for any length of time. It's really just the kind of game you want to have and the energy you're willing to invest into having it.

@Faceless Was pretty much my sole reason for having coded objects, 100%. In theory, it shouldn't matter. And yet. AND YET.

Whether someone is a player or staff doesn't really matter all that much, just whether someone is there to create story for other people. A player on a pure sandbox running stories nonstop for 20-30 other people is probably way way more important to the game's vibrancy than a staffer grinding through jobs, and a storyteller on a non-sandbox tying people together and making the stories overlap is gonna be more meaningful for a game's success than a half dozen players chatting in an ooc room or whatever. I honestly don't think the setting matters all that much aside from that initial interest.

@Thenomain said in Mage: the Ascension Online:

To explain the Debbie Downer post from @ixokai, Mage does not seem to lend itself to turn-based combat, considering that one of the core precepts of Mage (any version) is that of using magic in creative and unexpected ways, while the description for 'MtAsc Online' is almost that of a Mud.

Both their post and their webpage describes it as a MUD. I don't there's any 'almost that of', unless I'm missing something.

@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.

@Lain God almighty that's cringey af.

Good old raph. He's so very bad at this.

@Wizz said in High Fantasy:

@Apos said in High Fantasy:

I don't think it is either, but that wasn't what I was getting at earlier. Okay so take like werewolf characters you see on the wikia for any WoD game, and read them over. I'm positive that if you looked at them, you get a pretty good idea how that character spends their time, day to day, between the major plots that shapes their lives. You can probably picture all the little minor social interactions.

Now try to do the same thing with a lot of dungeons and dragons characters. [...]
And those are the questions people need answered when doing the random RP that shapes social interactions on MUs, so anyone setting up a game in those settings has to be the one to answer them, even though the thematic settings already seem to be established.

What you all seem to be saying is that what we think of as a functional, successful MU* needs to look and play basically like a simulator rather than a role-playing game. I think that mindset is also behind a lot of the complaints we have about the state of most current games -- dinosaur characters, treehouse clubs, endless bar-p, sandboxes, etc.

I'd kinda like to see a MU* that is run more like a public OTT. Players can have bits that multiple characters are attached to and these characters are part of limited campaigns (as in, will end, characters get sent to that giant tavern in the sky) with scheduled scenes. "Downtime" rp is an option, but not incentivized or rewarded in any way - no weekly XP, no cookies or votes or whatever.

I mean...I'm not gonna do it but. XD

I wouldn't go that far, it depends on your goals. If you wanna use a MU to run a weekly campaign, or act as a waiting room for players and GMs between those campaigns, games do that. I'm not really into that style but I view it as a personal preference thing.

@Arkandel said in High Fantasy:

@Ominous That's just depending on the nature of the campaign being ran - I've seen similar/identical groups playing Vampire on table-top for instance.

I don't think D&D is inherently less about storytelling than say, Werewolf is. You can definitely run the latter in an episodic mission-based manner as packs do one hunt after the other.

I don't think it is either, but that wasn't what I was getting at earlier. Okay so take like werewolf characters you see on the wikia for any WoD game, and read them over. I'm positive that if you looked at them, you get a pretty good idea how that character spends their time, day to day, between the major plots that shapes their lives. You can probably picture all the little minor social interactions.

Now try to do the same thing with a lot of dungeons and dragons characters.

The reason that's harder is because those worlds, and high fantasy in general, are usually about portraying a few big changes on how the world is different in really grand overarching themes, and showing how they are very fundamentally different. It's a lot harder to answer the, 'Okay so what does day to day life look like' for those characters unless you have a really good writer that's showing that. Like, you could run a D&D campaign and MU that are set in Joe Abercrombie's first law or dragon age really easily, because they've already shown how those characters work in day to day life. But take random characters from stories set in shadowdale in the forgotten realms. They... hunt maybe? Something? Does Elminster magic away their problems? Who knows!

And those are the questions people need answered when doing the random RP that shapes social interactions on MUs, so anyone setting up a game in those settings has to be the one to answer them, even though the thematic settings already seem to be established.

@Arkandel said in High Fantasy:

I always thought it was really weird there were so few roleplaying D&D or Pathfinder MU* around given how popular they are on table-top.

More difficult to run and create a sustainable immersive environment not dependent on staff due to the lack of details in between stories.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in Active Games Of The Now?:

@Salty-Secrets said in Active Games Of The Now?:

If you want a list of games by population there's always the mudstats directory.

Does it actually update anymore? I used this and valued it for a long time, and the charts for the games listed are still nice, but last time I checked there as nobody really sticking new games on there anymore, at least not with any regularity. Like, there are two reasonably active BSG games right now, both of which have been running for going on a year, but I don't see either Orion or BSU listed. I don't think Arx is listed and it comes up in every "activity" conversation. Etc.

I submitted to it about a year ago but yeah was never added, so I just assume evennia doesn't jive with whatever crawler they use, dunno. I don't think it's a super big deal myself.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in How to Change MUing:

@Gilette said in How to Change MUing:

@AlexRaymond -- I actually think it is that, that there are still a lot of people who might log in a bit every week but don't really play. And, in my mind, they don't qualify as active MUers.

Maybe this isn't what you're trying to say, but the implicit attitude of YOU MUST BE ACTIVE AT ALL TIMES AND RP EVERY NIGHT FOR 6 HOUR SCENES is part of what drives more casual players out of the hobby. I don't think somebody who RPs a couple times a week is inactive at all. I think it's a reasonable level of activity and the hobby overall would be healthier if it was encouraged as a desirable median.

IMO there's no quicker way to make people quit than by saying, 'your fun relaxation is now an obligation'. F no, people are out of there.

@Gilette said in How to Change MUing:

I think the MU community is suffering from an increasingly low number of players. I would wager there are only a few hundred unique IPs left across all the major MUs.

It's low but more than that, around a little under a thousand-ish have logged into Arx at some point in the last year. Maybe a little less. Ignoring guests and whatever and going by people that have played the game with characters at some point it's 492. So probably closer to 3-4k unique players imo across MUs, since there's no way that every single person in the hobby has stopped by my game.

@faraday said in How to Change MUing:

@Rook Thanks but don't overestimate its success. There have been a number of people who got bored and quit because they're looking for something the game doesn't offer. And despite being a success by my standards, we can't hold a candle to somewhere like Arx in terms of logins (which many people use as a barometer of success). Narrow focus has both pros and cons.

Dude screw anyone that doesn't hold your game up as a success and just looks at numbers, pure numbers as a metric is really dumb. I would be ecstatic with 30 active players because then I could do completely hands on scenes all the time for each person active, as is I'm pretty much just an administrator that does some big sweeping stories now and then and throws out hooks as I can. Similarly it's legit impossible for me to devote the time I want to all the things I want, it just can't happen, and that's a gigantic advantage of a game with a more narrow focus. So I'm really flattered whenever anyone points to Arx as a success but they really really need to remember the advantages of a smaller game and what make their success so compelling.

Arx is pretty active, with a couple hundred-ish players active players. For whatever reason, most of the MU advertising sites I don't think work with evennia, so we're not on mudstats and the like. So I dunno, it's pretty possible that a lot of other large games aren't really listed there.

@Tempest I read that rule and as soon as I read it I immediately believed it was due to some bullshit someone had did in game. Was curious about it.

On CoI in general, a pretty common case is people liking a player and really wanting to just smother them with RP from every character they have and being controlling and creepy. CoI helps limit that, even if everyone doing that just needs to be nudged away, but it's definitely both genders and commonplace, 'I like the RP from X, so even if they aren't wild about me and are trying to avoid me I'll relentlessly pursue them and hope they don't realize the new character is me'. It's easier to have rules that make it explicitly clear that's not okay.

@ixokai said in Where do you draw the line in having your character take what would otherwise be an "IC" action for them?:

All of this can be boiled down to: Collaborate. This is a collaborative environment where we all want to have fun.

So basically everyone should stop, collaborate and listen.

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.

@Ghost I am certain with a great deal of effort that it could be mitigated, but I think the stories around the FCs are so core to the settings that it would present a constant challenge, and I think that's just always going to be extremely difficult to reconcile if you want to include existing IPs. I just personally find it cleaner to go, 'okay not an existing IP universe at all', but that's an entirely different kind of game.