@Ominous Hmm, what I more was getting at was that ones that are allow those FCs tend to be about those FCs, and then it's difficult to do dynamic change around them. If I didn't make Arx, I probably would have made a full OC/original theme modern day superhero type game, since I like the genre so much. I just don't like bumping into the hurdles around existing intellectual properties, and I don't really think it's niche, it's just very much an all or nothing proposition imo.
@BobGoblin said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:
In the mid-2000s there was a very (40+ player) successful X-men game based on the cartoons of X-men Evolution. It was limited to just the Brotherhood and Xavier's (although I think unaffiliated were in there as well.)
The more focused the game, the more impacting things can be on the micro level. Too many games are these giant monstrosities where what happens doesn't really matter. I'm assuming this is springing from the United thread. But even marvel 1963 which I've dabbled on is the same. More focused on # of players online then impact of story.
We have enough games where the big picture doesn't change, would love to see something with a new focus.
While this might sound weird or hypocritical from me since I run one of the larger games, I strongly agree. I enjoy storytelling smaller, very impactful events for characters, but due to the scope I really don't get to do that very often, and instead I need to focus on the very wide ranging changes that have the largest impact on the overall game world and prioritize things that change the narrative for the most characters.
To be honest, I think it's very difficult to run a FC focused game in a comic universe that doesn't have a lot of stasis pushback against any attempt to have dynamic changes. I love comic settings, but the draw of those games when they have FCs is the desire to play (and play with) recognizable characters, and it is -not- the world, meaning that derivation from that is intrinsically offputting to anyone but the people directly involved in the stories. Pretty much any significant change to any character runs the strong risk of being alienating to anyone that would find the game appealing, and without significant changes you have stasis. So you could do like World of Reboots, where you run a series of alternate universes, let whatever happens to FC happen for a year, then reboot over and over again, so someone coming into the game fresh isn't wondering why Batman's been dead for 3 years, Superman is now a regular guy, Lex Luthor reformed, etc.
I personally find established intellectual properties a giant headache to work with as settings or characters and would rather not because of that stasis effect.
@Tinuviel said in Things We Should Have Learned Sooner:
The main one, and it's a deep'un, that I took forever to learn is this: Most of the time people don't think about you. If you're not a complete boor, you don't have very much to worry about socially. Whatever you think people are obsessing over or gossiping about you behind your back... they probably aren't.
ETA: This doesn't count for this community. We're vengeful pricks.
I dunno. I've gotten approached several times in the past year by people thinking I have some kind of grudge or antipathy for them and I have no idea what they are talking about. Even the people that I'm like, 'yeah I don't think we work well together and I'm not gonna collab on anything with them in the future' I'm not building creepy shrines of hate to them, and I don't think other people are either. Of the couple dozen 'thanks but no thanks' I've said, only one has stalked my facebook and used a VPN to spam profanity at me so hey, that's hitting at under 5 percent.
I'm not going to think less of any coder that also just says, 'I don't wanna implement this' for any number of reasons, including they don't have the time or consider it a monumental pain in the ass. I think that's perfectly valid. I would just argue against things when I see them as being like, 'I think this is bad for games' if I strongly disagree and consider them net positives done in different implementations.
@golgoth said in nWoD2.0 Support Code?:
I know I'm invoking taboo when I say this, but have you guys checked out the MOO called Sindome? It relies on a strict adherence to IC communications only. ooc chatter is to be kept to a minimum, paging players is frowned upon, IC mail (I can't remember what they call it) and commlinks / phones are used extensively for RP purposes.
I like RPI type setups, and it does avoid some common headaches while introducing a lot of others, but that's been discussed so often I don't think I need to go into it. Now what I don't see mentioned much and what I do think is relevant is that I feel that organically encouraging RP and making things immersive is way, way more newbie friendly than the mush approach, or the very ooc centric approach you see in rp forums.
Theno made a comment about that if IC only approaches were popular, then MMOs would do it. That's very funny because RP communities in MMOs tend to fall way harder on the scale of something like RPI. There might be a few hundred roleplayers in a zone, most who have never met one another before, and they just randomly approach one another IC and leap right in with no ooc communication at all. OOC communication would just come after people get to know each other. There's no written code of etiquette or even really understood norms, it just develops because it's very intuitive- someone is there on a character, other people are talking IC and throwing out emotes, someone feels they can add something, they jump in.
The bar for entry is vastly lower. Someone is on a character, they see something being said or done IC, they respond. That's pretty much it. Now, take a MUSH- they have to log in, create characters (often using out of game references to do so), then once they have those characters, they either need to be extremely proactive in reaching out to other people, or make sure they sell their concept and hooks in a way other people feel compelled to reach out to them. That's a really high bar to ask of a community that has a whole hell of a lot of people with social anxiety.
That's why immersion tools are important- they can be one of the easiest ways to allow people to get hooked into the game, get initial roleplay, and build the kind of relationships with other characters that lead to compelling stories.
Immersive tools are greatly underestimated. Every one I've seen added has created a lot more activity than I expected for something fairly small and trivial.
@Aria said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
So, I've been out of the (general) MU* scene long enough that I have no idea what this new-fangled Evennia thing is and my cursory (read: half-assed) reading of discussions on it haven't netted that much useful info. Can someone give me a rundown of how many crunchy commands I'd have to learn to play here and whether or not I'm likely to end up with a frustration-induced nosebleed from shouting obscenities at my computer trying to figure it out?
Evennia is just a different codebase to build games, so the actual games will probably vary a lot, but Arx should feel pretty mush-like with mostly identical functionality to MU commands you'd know. We tried to mimic the way most popular commands would work with more commonly used codebases, so hopefully it wouldn't feel that alien. Just a lot of additional tools once you get the hang of it. The crunchy commands are more fun or helpful tools layered on top of the basic commands you'd expect, in other words.
That said, writing a new player welcome guide is one of my goals during our between season break.
@mietze said in Forum Factions:
There isn't, but I wish there was, a grumpy old lady gang that I could be part of.
I'm 99% sure that Team Get Off My Lawn would have a shitload of members.
@shangexile said in RL Anger:
@shangexile If someone can tell me how to delete my account, I will. Can't seem to find the functionality.
- Change your password to random key-presses that you aren't paying attention to (ie. I3i38fbfjqoqoo3jebfhcui)
- then logout
- then delete the bookmark
- then lose the fucks you give.
Yeah, @Ghost gives solid advice, but just in case that's too tough, we can streamline the steps needed to take in order to pull it off. It can be tricky, so be sure to follow close on how to quit a forum, and don't be afraid to write it down and try it a few times until you get the hang out of it. Okay, so here's the step by step for how to quit.
Step 1: You stop posting.
Step 2. You do something else.
Now, you might find when you forget about step 1, then people call you creepy for being creepy, but it's okay. Just carry on to step 2, and sooner or later, you'll find you don't do step 1 anymore and then everyone that shudders in revulsion at you will stop, and everyone will be happier. We believe in you, you can do it.
@shangexile said in RL Anger:
@Meg Free country bro.
If your best defense is literally, 'Well. It's not illegal' then maybe you should re-evaluate your decision making. Just saying, brah.
@saosmash The temptation now is overwhelming to write a clue called "There's no accounting for taste".
@skew said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Sparks I hear Cardia is super nice and welcoming!
@Collective Hard for me to give anything but extremely broad advice that I'm not sure will be useful, but lemme give it a shot. Your 4 major IC challenges, the Mistrunning and Urban Exploration are super dependent upon active GMing, which isn't really a bad thing, but since that's so manpower intensive I'd think hard about making sure those 2 things result in a ton of hooks for your second 2 challenges- city politics and gangland/mystery men.
Because a lot of the game will be everyone reacting to the things done by active GMing, and then trying to create story about it, you need to make sure those latter 2 categories have enough meat so people can make their own fun off of it, otherwise imo you'll run into cases where people have trouble finding things to do because it is very funneled by the first couple categories, and since those are manpower limited you might have trouble accommodating them.
Frankly I don't think you need to worry about ideas being too niche or anything like that. If you are telling fun stories, people are going to come and play. The trouble will be only being one person and only being able to tell stories for so many people at once, and making sure the stories you tell create other stories that everyone can have fun with.
@rebekahse It sounds like you've been really thorough so it's unlikely, but maybe double check both the configure world settings and the configure program settings? Since it can have settings in two place, I guess it's possible one of the two could be overlooked and it could be something really random.
@Pandora said in Lords and Ladies Game:
Back on topic, I was just speaking to someone about how it can be hard to get into the swing of things on political games, if you're coming in late, or playing a character that wasn't much of a mover or shaker before you took them off the roster, but your interests lie in the social arena. I'm not a shy player, but what sort of advice would you all give someone trying to get involved without having to poke/prod people OOCly?
I dunno man, the only problem there is other people deciding to shoot pages or tells while trying to keep it IC, and then can just very politely brush that off and focus entirely on IC communication. I find it a mixed bag, I've always been able to get involved in fresh characters, but it is more of a, 'how much effort do I want to invest in this' thing in reaching out to people nonstop to get involved. It's tricky in that I don't really want new players overwhelmed by people reaching out to them by hitting people over the head with incentives to do that, but if the burden rests entirely on new players to put themselves out there IC, a lot of people will just say 'fuck it, this is too much work' and slip off after they fail to gel.
@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.
@Sparks 516 events total so far, looks like about 54 of the events were PRPs during the siege. That's just a rough guess on the times they were run and the names.
@Sparks Yeah very strongly agree with all of this, and I felt I learned a lot from the Siege of Arx and how players responded. Especially that people really like to run PRPs. There's been like 120 run during season 1. That's way, way, way, way more than I expected.
@Tez Can't really please everyone there, I have a wide scope of people that feel dynamic change is too much and would prefer things to be more stable, and others who believe it doesn't change enough. I think it doesn't hurt to go into it with a very general and broad idea of a wide open story, and try to consider the tons of ways it can fork and change based on player actions in ways that still are consistent with the underlying game world. The current stories I'm doing aren't really anywhere close to where I figured it would go in terms of forks, but it's still consistent and keeping with the base story. Also if players see very clearly the possible ways things could go, and buy into it, then there's a great deal of investment in the story and that their actions feel very consequential. Course, the danger there is that there's -too- much investment, and players get super pissed at one another for taking it in the other direction they don't like.
Edit: Wrote it before I saw you mention Arx, about PRPs. That's a fair criticism. The problem there is that GMing systems aren't in, and while I do think some of the PRPs have resulted in more change than people think, it's way too easy to have them be one offs that don't have that much impact, but you kind of need to hit a sweet spot there- too little ability to make change and it feels disconnected, too -much- and the world becomes a sandbox because the central narrative loses its strength as you have a ton of contradictory changes that loses coherency. So I have plans to address that, but didn't think it was super critical to do it yet.
@WildBaboons said in Lords and Ladies Game:
@Kanye-Qwest said in Lords and Ladies Game:
@Thenomain Not one person on our staff is incapable of dealing with pedantry, argument, or discussion
Not to derail the thread again but that right there shows an amusing lack of awareness
Please, people are pedantic and argumentative all the time, there's a difference in redirecting it to something more constructive, and that's why I don't tell people blunt things that aren't constructive that I don't think will help. Like my opinion of you, when it comes to an amusing lack of awareness.