@Misadventure said in The 100: The Mush:
Incorrect.
Example of describing a variety of possible actions as passive-aggressive. Perhaps you mean undermining, disregarding, disrespectful, not listening, etc.
It lacks the key element of accepting responsibility to do something, then not doing it as a form of resistance.
Would still be accurate and correct for Conflict Theory tho.
@tek said in The 100: The Mush:
My character: just lost her parents, distraught
His character: "If you want to talk, I'll be in my room"
Me: goes to find him in his room for a scene. scene starts.
Him: "Btw, I'm into Dom/sub relationships." switches to second-person text
His character: starts getting handsyYeah. Not sure how else this could have been interpreted, dude.
If someone asked me, "Hey what's the RP equivalent on a MU of sending an unsolicited dick pic to someone you just met?", now I have a really good example. If I was ever put in the situation of trying to explain why all that is fucked up, I really wouldn't bother- what's the point? Just wish them well in their future endeavors and move on. I mean normally I'd shake hands too, but in this case it seems a really, really bad idea.
@Tinuviel Still not as bad as wink ones.;) 
@Arkandel Yeah I agree 100%, I mean if a tool is too complicated then at best it won't be used, at worst it'll discourage people from not even trying to PRP since it'd turn them off from it.
@Griatch Right, that's exactly what I was thinking. In so much that right now on most mushes, people would be doing the, 'Hey we're running a Player Run Plot about <X Story Element>', and often people have no idea what's going on with that same story element or what has gone on before, so there's these big breaks in continuity and conflict in the current world state, so it could follow a VCS format of say, merging that story element back in to an overall world state continuity and updating anyone else wanting to run that plot, and letting every storyrunner/staff see what's going on with any particular story element at a time. So yeah, pretty much what you were thinking.
Right now the same thing is basically done by hand and guess work and memory of players/staff on mushes, which creates all the problems you can think of when it's human memory and players not knowing they have to talk to one another.
@Sunny said in The 100: The Mush:
I agree that it shouldn't be said that anything is possible when it isn't, but I vehemently disagree with a premise that staff characters shouldn't be played as characters. Staff are players, too. If that's their preference that's one thing, but there are MANY MANY benefits to having your staff play alongside everyone else. It is a bad premise.
I agree that staff playing can be tremendously helpful, and a big example of that is often kicking off stories with staff is too overt and more like a sledgehammer versus directing other characters towards a story on a PC can feel a lot more immersive and organic, and help people seamlessly move people into the story/plot. My preference is just to restrict myself to supporting characters without a story of their own, and I enjoy doing that, but I don't think it's a big deal if other people disagree and feel it would be an unfair tradeoff that being staff means they can't be central to stories and plots.
@Miss-Demeanor said in The 100: The Mush:
@Admiral Its nice to finally have my initial predictions and warnings validated.
They claimed it 'could have gone either way'... but it was really more like TR's 'there's a chance the apocalypse will happen!' in that things would have had to go WAY south for it to happen that way
I didn't play there so I can't say this is the case, but I've noticed staff on a lot of games have their heart set on a particular outcome and they throw out 'anything could happen' when they really, really don't mean that. I think that unless you really don't have a dog in the race and are okay with GMing every possible outcome, it's a bad idea to say that and get player expectations worked up. I usually don't have any preference myself, and I think staff not having PCs as anything more than story catalysts, fonts exposition, or clue dispensers etc really helps.
Updated to the new version of Evennia to finally merge that ancient fork, and on a new VPS- 45.33.87.194 port 3000. Think we fixed most of the bugs related to the swap but yell if you see anything, and channels will need to be readded.
@Misadventure said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
I also lay a lot of that at the general players feet. They no longer seem to want personalized content, not even from themselves.
Just participation.
I have never met a player that did not prefer personalized content. I can't think of a single case of it. It's just so far from my own experiences I can't relate at all.
@surreality said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
@Thenomain It's the improv factor, to some extent. People have gotten out of the habit of it to some extent.
I dunno. The games I 'grew up on', there were no staff plots, or were never any I was involved in at all. I never ran out of stuff to do, or failed to have fun based on that particular lack -- if I had I wouldn't be doing this at all, still.
So a lot of this is somewhat alien to me, instinctively, I think.
That's pretty much exactly the vibe I'm used to, and I think there can be a disconnect there in so much that a lot of people are used to scheduled events and clearly defined plots they can slip into. I mean they aren't wrong, it's purely a preference thing and I can see how ooc communication for that is even more vital, it's just a bit foreign to my experience and I'm taken aback when they don't see things with clearly defined boundaries and take that to mean that plots aren't developing. So I just have to be careful to accommodate that particular style without stomping on the kind of organic things I really love.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
This sounds very interesting in principle. I can see the overall gist of using a version control paradigm but I have a harder time seeing how to efficiently break up a plotline in a way to make it easy for players to branch and merge without a lot of manual management. Could you give some example of how this could work, in practice?
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Griatch
Right now things are so sandbox-y imo since the lack of tools heavily contribute to an environment that makes it extremely difficult for any individual storyrunner, even staff, to tell what other people have done/are doing in most mushes. It's largely relying on the memory of players and staff as they become aware of plot elements that might contradict previous things, and (this is a little outside my experiences so correct me if I'm wrong), probably creates hard feelings as someone runs a plot and then is retconned later after the fact by a staff member that suddenly realizes it contradicts something else. So for examples:
Currently- someone wants to run a plot that happens, as a side note, to include interaction with the chief of police of their sleepy town in Maine. It's revealed during the player run plot that the chief's a supernatural creature. Plot goes on for a month or two, and then second hand another player hears about the plot and mentions he ran a plot a few months ago that also mentioned the chief of police, but as a mortal hunter of the supernatural. Staff realizes it and tells group A that it no longer works, and it's retconned in progress to the annoyance of all involved. There's a lot of suggestions like, 'keep the amount of storytellers small' specifically because the games are basically reliant on everyone just to remember what happened and talk to each other for clarification, without really anything to refer to.
What I'd propose- a web form that has list of all story plots that have happened and are on going, searchable and collapse-able, with very brief summaries (maybe a couple sentences), but more importantly discrete plot categories. In the previous example, someone filling a web form for their proposed plot would plug in 'police' as a category along with vampires, some crime family, and any other story element categories. They could click an element, bringing up a list of previous plots involving it, and examining the elements would show that a plot six months ago has a note of, 'Police: Chief of Police's secret identity', letting them know there is a potential conflict, and alerting staff briefly overviewing plots for approval that there is a potential conflict.
So in comparison to a version control paradigm, it's extremely useful for players and staff to be able to tell what story elements are currently in play and present conflicts when being modified as a branch of the overall story. It would still need a lot of manual management, but in going back to the version control paradigm the current situation is more everyone doing their own thing in the dark and just hoping it works out.
Having thought a little bit more about what tools might be extremely useful for organizing plots, it occurred to me that a lot of the common issues facing staff and non-staff storytellers aren't really all that dissimilar from a design perspective as version control, like in coding. The games usually aim to have one big central continuity and story state, so characters can interact with one another, but there can be any number of contributors each starting their own branch with a story that potentially forks it off when things become mutually contradictory.
So it seems like we could use the same principles in creating overview tools that would let any storyteller have a much, much easier time of seeing what all story elements are currently in play in plots (and would present potential collisions/contradictions), what all is being decided, and just when a plot is being resolved and could be merged/pulled back into the overall plot of the game. So not unlike what @surreality was thinking about with wikis, but for my case, would just be using django to create a hierarchy tool with the current existing plots, sorted by their different plot category elements, whether they are resolved or ongoing, who's running them/who is participating, and whether any elements need resolution due to conflicts with other plots. Hell, could even automate it with categories for plot elements, like in a wod game if someone put in a plot that was involving the police or an antagonist group, the tool would just check what other ones currently were ongoing, to see if there would be potential story conflicts. Just things to make communication between storyrunners a lot easier and simpler.
@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
Now as @Arkandel started discussing +jobs I realized this wouldn't really cover the different use cases for players (without staff permissions) running plots, for a lot of reasons. There's so much staff-only information in there that I don't know if I could make lock type permissions robust enough that would really cover all the cases of a player not seeing something they shouldn't by accident if we would give players access to it. So instead I'd have to be able to bump things down to a player running stories, and probably create something more like what he's familiar with, with a staffer looking at an investigation and going, 'Oh yeah this is for @Arkandel's plot, sending it down to him' and creating a thread for it that could still have dice rolls and automated results in it.
Although I like where it's coming from you need to be careful; a system like that scales poorly - there is a limited number of staff and a far less limited number of open plot lines stacking up on top of the day-to-day maintenance overhead that comes with running an active game. If the workload spikes a bit or, heavens forbid, staff get more on their plate in real life or are burning out or any of these very common things then it's easy for them to become a bottleneck.
The advantage of an entirely player-managed system is that it takes all that out of the equation.
Yeah, I think we'd need to have something that wouldn't be able to get hung up and just sit there for forever while a half-dozen players are waiting for stories to go on. Which probably mean going immediate to players that can answer it, with the potential to be escalated to staff if needs be, rather than the reverse. The trick there, from a macro perspective, is making sure that things don't have contradictions or continuity breaks that can force the game into changing into a sandbox due to a lack of staff oversight- but even though that's something I wanna avoid it is definitely the lesser of two evils than plot just dying because it can't move forward at all.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
What is the mechanics behind a +job? You make a post only the ST can see specifying the tools/skills/etc they want to use, and the ST then eventually gets back to you with a result? To get a feel for it, is this more structured than, say, a message board with private sections?
Again explaining it through actual use, but a +job in this context is essentially a single thread into which anyone tagged can post messages and send rolls into.
In this case I as the Storyteller would first start the thread by giving it a title ("Orc attack investigation") and an initial text ("Hey guys, this is for your investigating needs, tell me what you'll be doing"). Then I CCing my group's characters into it and they can start posting things in there ("Alright, so I'll contact the Mayor and ask if the Orcs ever troubled the village before"), etc - stuff that wouldn't necessarily be good enough to run an entire scene for. If needed I can ask players to make rolls into the +job ("roll empathy to see if the Mayor is lying").
I see, so this moves the game from (semi-) real time on-grid to a more abstract GM-Player like thing. Potentially Play-by-post almost, since it can be managed without ST and player being online at the same time.
It's important for this to be something players can do on their own without having to bug staff about it, including to close or leave the +job if it no longer applies to them.
I can certainly see the point of that, yes.
This part of the thread has been very useful for me, since it reminded me a few use cases that I missed. And I don't think @griatch is off the mark here, in thinking that (from a MUD perspective) that it is more like a play-by-post. It wouldn't sound quite right to most MUSHers, since play-by-post is such a different format normally, but handling any kind of off-screen details and furthering story that way is pretty rare outside of MUSHes from what I've seen. While for our games I'd say it's pretty vital that characters have a degree of abstract control over what happens during downtime or offscreen, and stories continue to be developed in between RP scenes.
Now for Arx, a large concern was that it was easy for 'here's what my characters want to find out off-screen' could quickly become overwhelming, so we made an +investigations system in order to gate and automate the process. Characters put in a long description of things they are trying to find out and how they are going about it, and then this is all handled in an abstract way off-screen and during downtime which is why it draws play-by-post comparisons. And it's a string search for keywords of the topics, and searches for random potential pre-built string results of findings, and then rolls a combination of character stats/skills to determine what string they should get as a result- a clear success with metaplot information, a red herring that's misleading, just a failure, partial progress, etc. And as players ask questions we hadn't considered, we just add more strings of results to allow for easy duplication for the next player trying to find out the same thing. It still requires a lot of GM review, just because it would be easy to have keywords that don't really make sense for some of the results (and using djago's icontain's model could make partial matches that go way way off, so it would need a much smarter search), and GMs have to be ready to jump in and redirect things, but it handles a lot of the problems of GMs potentially being overwhelmed by gating the amount of questions players can reasonably investigate and automating a great deal.
Now as @Arkandel started discussing +jobs I realized this wouldn't really cover the different use cases for players (without staff permissions) running plots, for a lot of reasons. There's so much staff-only information in there that I don't know if I could make lock type permissions robust enough that would really cover all the cases of a player not seeing something they shouldn't by accident if we would give players access to it. So instead I'd have to be able to bump things down to a player running stories, and probably create something more like what he's familiar with, with a staffer looking at an investigation and going, 'Oh yeah this is for @Arkandel's plot, sending it down to him' and creating a thread for it that could still have dice rolls and automated results in it.
@Arkandel said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
- There are better tools to encourage grid use than eliminating otherwise great commands like that; hidden rooms for instance with IC secrets in them, if someone codes it for Arx there can be resources or items spawning on the grid, plot tips for characters to investigate in real time instead of over +jobs, etc.
I'm still debating the pros and cons myself, but I thought it would be a good time to highlight that for #2, some of that actually already exists. There's a few different implementations for secret rooms (some are only accessible to organizations, some only require guessing of the name), but I think I've made a dozen-ish or so. I'd have to count to get a number, they are mostly for the core different secret societies, metaplot secrets, etc.
@Arkandel I definitely agree, I'll probably write up tonight a rough and dirty guideline for PRP type storytelling in alpha and beta until we get the code support for it, but the very short version will be as long as someone runs a story by me so I can check it for thematic consistency, it's fine. Since there's a ton of hidden elements that could contradict what people find to be intuitive from a storytelling perspective, I'd just want to sign off on it until more becomes clear, and for now anyone could just shoot me a page on Apostate as the easiest thing, or a request. It'll be much, much more clean once we get the systems coded, but that'll hold true for just about everything.
Yeah, it's one of our big projects in getting help files and presentation fixed up and making everything more intuitive in general, and I won't hold it against anyone that waits for us to be further down in development and the game to be more polished before diving in. I do greatly appreciate the patience and feedback of testers as they try it out, though.
There's not much saving individuals that are so self-absorbed that they cannot recognize the sacrifices of others that help them or refuse to face the hard truths about their own culpability for their poor circumstances. Never be responsible for them, since they will never appreciate it nor change.
It scares me a little that there's enough options that it's hard to narrow it down.
