Posts made by Apos

I really would not want to put a sexual assault victim in a spot where they have to say, 'I am uncomfortable with any part of this RP and wish to fade to black any and all of it and just let a GM determine the consequences', but it is the logical conclusion of a (nearly) completely hands off staff in a yes-first type game. I think that you should probably be as painfully clear as possible in any fade-to-black policy. It's very surprising how many players feel pressured to RP out scenes they are deeply bothered by and they really, really need to feel that staff has their back. I wouldn't take it for granted at all that players would think first to fade even in scenes.

@Groth I does happen. I remember @Luna on The Reach having a bad experience with a four and a half hour scene that probably should have taken a fraction of that, if my memory serves. It's just whether you want to deal with scolding players into being reasonable on time or reverse 'bad' deaths from afks, idles, linkdeaths, whatever.

@Arkandel said:

Players have all the tools to deal with and isolate, bring IC consequences or anything else to these people. The game isn't consent-based by definition. Law enforcement PCs can imprison them, badasses can beat them up or kill them. The tools are there.

This is one interesting problem I've been having when deciding automation of combat in a MUSH, which is a logical continuation of reducing staff work as much as possible. Do you go with combat rounds being timed (which would allow the death of idle/afk characters), or do you go with combat being turn based, which allow players to potentially stall by refusing to advance combat to the next round? I was leaning towards the second with potential GM intervention and arbitration, since I thought it would be less disruptive than retcons (or permissiveness) of killing characters afk on the grid.

@Arkandel said:

My hope is that once power over inclusion is given entirely to players and they can manage their own affairs a lot more efficiently than we've often seen so far they will be able to value leadership figures on their own and replace them without need for external guidance. After all if your leader is in absentia and you are active... vote him down and replace him, why is that a problem? Now if he's sort of active but just logs on to resist such motions then it's an entirely different ball game.

Oh yeah my fault, I should have clarified that the final case you just described is specifically what I was thinking of, which I was thinking about 'soft' activity requirements. From how you are designing it sounds like you never want to be in the position of having staff come in and remove a position, which probably means I'd have to make the system be on the side of the insurgents.

You could make a few coded requirements- a vote referendum on a position can be initiated by anyone, but the position can be challenged only once every month or two months. Whatever you feel is appropriate but I'd settle it early and wouldn't change it, or you'd have players upset as they feel the rules are changed on them. Characters can't vote unless they have been active (you could base activity off some metric of scenes, plots, whatever) in the sphere for at least a month. You could limit or boost status of the incumbent by the same activity metrics.

One tricky thing imo is in a very liberal, yes-first style is you might have to decide how much storytelling power the GMs have. Like for example you said you want all leadership positions be completely determined by players, and I like and admire that, but then you also have this kind of awkward limiting factor on storytelling where you don't want the big stories run by GMs to be seen as deciding a leadership spot by creating stories that call a leader's ability to lead into question. Since if you have those, it will be seen as GM interference and call into question staff bias, and if you don't then there's that kind of almost full-consent feel of, 'I don't have to do anything in that story as a leader, because it can't hurt me.'

@Arkandel I think there's a few different ways to handle the idle clog, and it depends on how code heavy you want to be really and where you want the balance to fall in allowing new players to shake up the order versus preserving the old. If you want to go with totally player controlled player voting, you don't need to weight status vote at 1 vote per 1 dot either. You could change that multiplier to decide just how easy or hard you want to make ousting anyone, or even reduce/increase a modifier based on someone's activity and so on. Automated modifications based on player activity would remove accusations of staff bias but let people attempt to game whatever system you have in place.

I would lean away from hard activity requirements as such, since they feel punitive and are a big turnoff for something as casual as a game and would be contrary to your yes-first philosophy. I would try to look more at incentives for activity for any leadership figure, particularly when they are interacting with players outside of their circle of friends. XP is probably the easiest carrot to work around, but problematic in how much you want to manage the power of characters. However I don't think a one time reward for the first time someone has a scene with another character would be unreasonable for example, and create an incentive for any leadership figure to meet a new character hitting the grid.

I heartily approve of your style for design even if it's kind of the far other side of what I'm going for, but to me I think either tightly controlled for the story or extremely loose and liberal are totally fine as long as players are treated reasonably and with respect.

@Arkandel said:

• ( 3, 4, 5 ) Being staff is a role, not a privilege. All staff must contribute and their number should be small. Since the importance of handling +jobs is minimized the main duty is handling interpersonal issues, auditing potential cases of system abuse, but mainly running and coordinating running plot. Staff never decides on character positions or non-mechanical eligibility for ability or power purchases.

I love this a lot, but I think the biggest problems will be in auditing to keep consistency and making sure all staff is on the same page, though I'm sure you know this. What I think might be more worrying is trying to coordinate PRP with a true metaplot, because that requires either that you basically really work with players to keep internal consistency in the story (and that would also require you telling them enough of the plot to keep them from contradicting it) or constantly limit their story's scope and access to what's truly going on. So I think you'd just have to decide what approach you want fairly early on, whether you want to make the metaplot revealed to all and have no surprises, whether you want to have PRPs be extremely limited in what they can do, or whether you want to have enough staff where you are running enough stories that PRP don't really feel necessary. All of these are fine you'd just need to know going in.

• ( 3, 6, 8 ) Characters decide their own groups' composition. Status-weighted votes determine ranks, positions and membership. To facilitate early game launches NPCs are set in place who can be voted out or competed with as normal by PCs. Conversely that means there are no protections for IC actions; highly ranked characters are bigger targets who may be eliminated in the same way as NPCs. Staff only audits this process to ensure OOC behavior remains civil and, to the extent it is possible for them to establish, that no OOC means or information were employed.

Good, and my preferred method, but you must make sure the means of removal of the barely active are very accessible to players. I'd say players that get a title/position/whatever and then idle out and stifle all RP around them are more common than the players that are big contributors to activity in a game. If you don't have good means of players doing this themselves, you could be dragged into endless GM'd pvp arbitration that leaves everyone unhappy.

• ( 2, 3, 8 ) Plot is the game's lifeblood. The game comes with its own metaplot which is written to be modular and altered by characters. Staff's primary concern is to coordinate players and either run plots contributing to the overall story themselves or support players in running their own. This takes precedence over all other staff concerns save ones which make the game actually unplayable, staff should never feel they can't run an event because they're busy dealing with a troublesome player. Move the distraction in whatever manner is most appropriate and run the event.

Extremely good, but to be frank I think most MU admins are way too soft a touch and not even close to ruthless enough to really do this. You see posts about giving people MONTHS of second chances for a wildly disruptive player. You absolutely will not have time to run things if you administrate like that. If someone is disruptive, you need to show them the door immediately. No second choices, no long debates. Nothing. They have to just be gone and that's that and deal with the angry threads here calling you hitler. I believe you can't get away with any less and reasonably run the game.

• ( 1, 2, 4 ) CGen has no non-automated approval conditions and there are no 'special' cases; roll what you will. It will check if you have a description and that your numbers check out, then you're on your way. If (due to code limitations) staff has to set things by hand it can happen after characters hit the grid with the understanding you can't use any missing attributes or resources in the meantime, in order to prevent mistakes or misunderstandings about mechanics ('oh, sorry, I thought I could buy Sleepwalker merits as a ghoul' -- which would be an example of one of the 'good, thematic reasons' to say no, as described above).

Very sandbox-y, I think you might be underestimating the amount of disruptive concepts you have to deal with. Also the whole 'check to make sure if they are thematic' might have a really wide interpretation among staff which will lead to a lot of debates, and can be around something like, 'Is a troll playing a graphically sexualized character that some players find offensive worth removing or not'. Either answer will probably have some players leaving, and is a stark reminder you really can't please everyone. I'd decide early on which you want to keep rather than have a constant unhappy attrition there.

• ( 4, 5 ) Cut down on building delays; in most MU* this is time consuming, requiring checks on behalf of staff, setting exit/entrance messages, etc. It's cool to see 'Bob gets in from the street' but it doesn't provide enough to the game - "Bob has arrived" is sufficient if it cuts down on time. Let players make their own rooms on the grid, even businesses, and simply have a periodic auditing process to make sure they comply with writing regulations (tabs, linefeeds between paragraphs) so the game maintains a consistent style.

Very good but again I'd be ready for a lot of casually thematic breaks. This is not so bad if you want to have a sandbox, which is fine, but there will be a whole lot of descriptions which are inherently contradictory to other things and describe impossibilities. Imo I'd write a desc guide that specifically informs players of good practices, so you don't have multiple people trying to describe their location as the best X, the only X, whatever.

@faraday There's a lot of random, dumb and arbitrary deaths that happen when it's left purely to chance and I think we know how it can rob everyone of an extremely good story when 'well, it seems the protagonist fell down a cliff and died' leaves everyone with a pretty stupid anti-climax.

My feeling in addressing the problem players that @Coin mentions is to have more perceived risk than actual risk. I really, really hate killing players, but it's not that bad for dramatic tension if they think it is way worse than it actually is.

Related on the subject of posing speed, but probably an unpopular opinion here: I think pose orders are god awful and inherently destructive to the tempo of any scene. I was horrified by them on the Reach. They were an unholy abomination unto the lord. Any scene with a few strangers was so very excruciating and pointless and arduous that I was like, 'Oh. So that's why everyone here hates social RP. MAKES SENSE NOW.' Holy shit they made things so damned slow and tedious. I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER play on any game where that's an accepted part of the culture again. No fucking way, I'd rather have a root canal without pain killers.

Fuck 4 hours for a 1 page long log. Jesus christ.

@Arkandel Yeah, and I agree. I kind of dislike the idea of feature characters intrinsically for the same reason, that I feel like it's a very open door to showing favoritism (or even just the appearance of favoritism) that's a turn off to a lot of players.

It can certainly be abused and badly, including nightmare situations of having to take a character away completely from a problem player which I think is probably a lot more traumatic than IC character death since its a pretty explicit condemnation of a player's style. But overall I think for the goal of running something like a campaign the kind of stability that consistent characters give is a huge help.

@Arkandel Oh yeah, sorry. I was referring to a roster of available pre-generated characters for a mush. Specifically, it wouldn't be so much a 'these are for new players who don't want to make characters or are unfamiliar with the theme' but instead more 'these are extremely significant characters with key parts of the plot, and if the player playing it idles out, a new player will be re-cast in the role to make sure there is no lapse in continuity and the story doesn't have to be rebuilt to account for their absence.'

So it does handle continuity problems really well, a lot better than I thought it would, but it's not something a lot of players might really want to go for or be willing to give a shot.

@Arkandel said:

While you're at it, realize the game is also a participant. I had a plotline on Eldritch for 6-7 people, 5 of whom disappeared after a couple of months. That decimated my plans because too many of the hooks and threads I had planted were left dangling, and I would essentially have to start over.

One side note, until I tried it I never liked the idea of a roster system for characters. Having tried one, I was surprised at how effective it was at reducing the problems involved with continuity since so many of the characters involved in storylines could stay consistent. Obviously not everyone's cup of tea but might be worth considering.

@SG Yeah, I've seen it done really well and really badly. For the ones I felt were really well done, I really see two requirements and this doesn't necessarily mean it has to be small but you can tell why it helps: 1) I think that for it to be done well, the plots have to be accessible to pretty much any played character. 2) And I think the GM has to be so familiar with every character that can be involved to make it reasonably structured to them to make it meaningful. Partially customized, if not fully.

I think the only reason this sounds so unreasonably high a bar is because most MUs have become super insular and characters are very likely not familiar with each other. In thinking of one counter example, I played on a place with hundreds of characters that I could have recited from memory what their personalities and goals were like, and that was just due to the really high degree of interaction, not because I'm anything special memory wise.

@surreality said:

I get the 'you must be a guy' all the time on Shang. When I ask why, I tend to get, "Because all the real girls around here are sweet and giggly and affectionate!" (I'm not.)

All the actual female players I know there... uh... yeah, they're more or less like me, so I never know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that answer. (Which is the same every. fucking. time.)

That just strikes me as so odd. I can think of a few dozen female MU players, and I'm trying really hard to think of any I would ever describe as 'giggly' and coming up with a blank. It's so different from all the ones I know I just don't even know where that would be coming from.

@Cirno said:

This raises interesting questions - is MU* ing a gentrified, expensive hobby out of reach to the poor? Could that be part of the reason why the population of MU* players is low in general? And why is this, since computers have sharply decreased in price? One can acquire a cheap tablet or netbook for 50$ or so.

I don't think it's that, not when you look at tens of millions of people playing MOBAs and MMORPGs, it's hard to look at it from a scarcity standpoint. I think MUSHes offer something unique that's pretty hard to explain. If you google 'text based role playing games', I flipped through a few pages and saw a few MUDs and a -lot- of browser games that are kind of MUD like, but nothing like what most MUSHers enjoy. It's pretty easy for people that have never played an rpg at all before to grasp playing a dude on a MUD and running around killing things in a world. I think it's a lot harder to get across how a collaborative storytelling narrative game works, and I'd be curious what people's elevator pitches of a MUSH are like to people that have never played any form of RPG before.

How sandboxy is the game, really? The more it is, the less thematic purity matters. A lot of WoD games I feel like most of the characters have absolutely no impact on any of my characters whatsoever and vice versa. That's fine, it's not a criticism, just a design choice. But in those games even a character that's drastically out of step with the theme of the game might not be very noticeable to the player base at large.

On a game that's not sandboxy at all, you just can't allow it and would have to immediately remove it, since their existence would disrupt all existing rp.

@Roz It's kind of like a Tier position, only the more you invest the lower you drop.

@Entropy "Hey guys I'm going to make a new superhero game because the current ones are run by loons and I want a non-toxic environment. Anyone interested?" Just go with that, I know that's what you're saying but it didn't really come off that way.

And in all sincerity, best of luck and I also hope you succeed.

@silentsophia said:

4. Holy fuck, bilingual labeling and non-white co-workers and customers really bring out the racists.

Man, that sinking feeling whenever someone starts a sentence with, "I'm not a racist, but..." Please stop right there, bro.

@Coin Come to think of it, the most rewarding full-consent rp I've had with a lot of heavy conflict narratives was based in superhero style rp, and I didn't even think of it till you said it. But now that you did, the community (and a really large one) was noticeably way way more okay with losing than any other one I've been in, and you're right, I still don't know why.

I think it might be that most of the natural narrative arcs for comic characters really need to have awful things happen to them in order to create conflict for stories, so they expect it. Maybe. I really am not sure either.

@Roz said:

One of the things I don't understand: there's been a lot of talk of people liking staff being Dark to watch things for the purposes of spontaneous plot. But why exactly do they have to be Dark to do this?

They don't, it's just more immersive if they aren't. Same reason I dislike people ever discussing RP with me in advance, or ever talking to me in OOC to arrange a scene. I just don't do it if I can help it.