Posts made by Apos

@sunnyj said in oWoD - Is there such thing as a good one?:

It was designed as a tool kit, and oWoD was designed as a world on its last, dying breath. One of them may be fun to play and all, but the other made you involved, made you want to buy the next book to see what was up.

Yeah this pretty much sums it up for me. It could be dumb at times, but it was bold and made for a vivid world and story, and there felt like real feeling and investment into the story. The cosmology of something like oWoD demon or mage or vampire really grabbed me, and the whole story of the God Machine just doesn't do it for me.

A friend wanted to roll up a character to play with me on Everquest, so I made a cleric to play with them and took the name Apostate, figuring they wouldn't get along with the thematic other clergy. Intended to just help show them around as a throw away character and help them through the newbie levels. Wound up being my main that I led guilds with and I played for over a decade, and it's just an old handle I go back to now and then.

@sunny said in MU Things I Love:

@admiral

While I do agree that more folks can behave maturely and in a relaxed fashion than can't, I don't agree that it's always due to favoritism issues. I think that it's just that most people are not the awful beasts we make them out to be a lot of the time, and if you have high expectations, people tend to meet them.

Yeah it's a trust thing really, if an environment starts to feel like as long as they are chill they'll be treated fairly, people respond to that. Certainly the opposite is true, and it takes a long time for people to overcome their bad experiences and give a place a chance, but a lot do.

@faraday said in A new platform?:

As you say, though, the immediacy is forced by the tool itself. There's nothing technical stopping it from working more like discord/slack/etc., where folks could be @-tagged and see responses later. We just need to make it work that way. Sometimes culture drives a tool but in this case the tool is driving the culture.

Yeah there's a tremendous amount of MU habits that are the tools driving the culture. Like we can give a ton of examples of MU habits that are based on tools:

1. People having no idea who is typing, or who is posing, or who is really idle or not. Most modern messengers have indicators for who is typing.
2. Screen scroll defaults mean spam is disproportionately annoying, with tons of cultural habits around spam because of how things will scroll that can't be ignored.
3. Mavs happening because of lack of clarity in conversational channels.
4. Constant small little fights because of ambiguity in who was informed of something or not, with no easy way of checking.

etc.

@three-eyed-crow said in A new platform?:

I realize some Mushers don't use spawn windows but I struggle to imagine functioning without them, and shifting channels to other tabs/rooms ala discord and slack just feels like that, only less work on my end.

I think spawns are a great idea, but I don't use them kind of because of the nature of talking in discord vs a MU. Like in discord with friends, I might drop a comment and respond to something a few hours later, it's a very asynchronous messenger. Maybe a conversation will pass by, but I can catch up whenever.

MUs often don't really have that feel. There might be 10 different questions in 10 different ways, that all happen at the same time and if I miss them then, like if they are filtered to a spawn I check 40 minutes later, it's probably irrelevant and someone logged off and missed something they wanted to know. The format isn't really nearly as great in easily referencing old information, which puts an emphasis on immediacy, mostly because tools like mail or channel histories or whatever are so clunky. So because of that, I feel like I need to be focused more on when things happen for immediate relevance, than being able to sort them and check tabs at my leisure like I would in discord.

@ganymede said in A new platform?:

But we also need to do what Lithium is doing, and we need to make sure our gaming environment is as helpful and welcoming as possible. Not that games don't do this, but, let's face it, we've all been on games where people seem loathe to actually help people.

That's a topic for another day. But, as one of the old farts around here, I ain't afraid of no new platform, bitches, so you best get going on that shit.

I don't think it's unrelated though. Like MUDs and MUSHes get grouped together interchangeably on a lot of sites but we know there's some really core philosophical differences in how they are presented for a lot of them, with a lot of MUDs being a MMO writ small while a MUSH being a tabletop writ large. This also means a different approach towards new players, where the former is going to be a lot more automated because a reactive environment is a core part of their game philosophy, while the latter is about getting players into RP situations with other players.

For mushes, I think even aside from all the technological hurdles, we're waaaaaay more reliant on it being a welcoming environment than most other game formats. Not just in removing toxic hostility, but if someone logs into a confusing new game, tries to RP, and has no luck, it's a hard sell for them to just keep at it. I think people will forgive an unbelievably confusing and archaic format if they find RP and have fun, but that won't happen without active engagement and mentorship for most people.

Another tricky aspect is that imo one of the biggest strengths of MUSHes and what makes them a compelling RP format is inherently limiting in size. One of our strong selling points for some MUs is that we are providing hands on, personalized stories that overlap with other people. And GMs can only GM for so many people, so growing past a certain point is extremely challenging with most games just want a sweet spot of players and no more or no less.

Evennia's parser helps a bit, in that it can ignore leading characters, so +finger, finger, @finger, whatever all would do the same thing, but the command structure still drives people nuts that aren't used to MUs even so.

Tumblr, roleplaying forums, slack, discord, MMO roleplaying communities, facebook groups, etc, etc. There's a ton of roleplayers out there, and most of those formats dwarf MUs as a hobby in size. All the formats have their strengths but none really duplicate the same large scale interconnected stories thing that MUs do well. I think Evennia and Ares will really help in making it accessible, though there's some other issues even aside from telnet and that most people have never heard of MUs.

I think most things like this are a balance between the enjoyment of one person and the continuity of the game or immersion of other players. Most wrongfun type stuff are arguments because one person's enjoyment is jarring for other people and they feel like it diminishes their fun, and I think it's just a careful compromise between the two, whether it's about theme, or minute details that are meaningful to one person because of their real world expertise, or allowed character types or PBs or anything.

For me I just allow respecs that don't change a character's core concept, would invalidate previous RP, or are too jarring because of degree. I think that limits the abuse cases while avoiding punishing simple mistakes.

I do use the soap opera thing as a general analogy for roster characters pretty often, when talking to players. For people very uncomfortable with playing a roster character, often they hate the idea of not living up to others' ideal of what the character should be, or being a close enough interpretation to a previous player. Talking about the whole different actor taking on the same role helps a lot of people be reassured about that, particularly when most other players are willing to roll with anything jarring to immersion when someone just has a different take on a character.

I personally see PBs as being interpretive, so I lean towards letting people change them, but I can understand other games that see them as a more hard definition and wouldn't want them changed.

I'd just say don't excessively future proof characters. Don't ask questions for potentials that are unlikely to ever come up, and wouldn't be a big deal to resolve when they do by asking then.

@three-eyed-crow What I really want to avoid is, 'Someone didn't invite me and a friend to a party and I feel slighted'. While that's generally what players get worked up about, it's just not what the NPCs would care much about. Except maybe the Salon or something. Maybe Petty Social Slights That Should Get A Champion will be one of their core principles. But probably not.

For actual condemns, the only time I might bring it back is in an extremely narrow scope. I was considering opt in rivalries, which both players would have to voluntarily opt into, and then they could use condemns on one another, and only them (not their friends or the like). The lost prestige would go to a pool that is then in a ranking systems of Biggest Beefs of Arx or Top Rivalries or whatever, contributing to a current and lifetime total, and if they then settle their beef in a big dramatic twitter esqe mountainous molehill, they can try to flip the negative lost prestige into a positive, in self-indulgent and self-congratulatory celebrity fashion.

@three-eyed-crow said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

@crysta said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):

Yeah I think Arx Twitter does enough shaming for silly things.

Condemn doesn't work for the same reason no one likes downvoting on forum threads.

It definitely doesn't work and I don't want it back.

What I dislike currently, though, is that serious thematic issues don't receive a blink a lot of the time (murder a dude with an heirloom weapon? Go about your life, nobody really cares) while people freak the fuck out over ultra-minor shit. It makes a lot of thematic things in an honor-bound society feel like they don't have any actual weight, while being paranoid about saying something 'wrong' in journals.

IDK, I honestly wouldn't mind seeing more stuff that impacted IC reputation but I'd like there to be an OOC gate on it, which is probably too much work for staff, so whatevs I guess.

Funny you should mention that.

So a long time ago I decided on a replacement, and how I thought I could implement a system that reduces toxicity while underscoring thematic disapproval of things, and I'll talk about the ones geared towards player control (with staff oversight), that I think will probably do it.

I'll ultimately implement Issues of the Day and Vox Populi that's far more player influenced, but how it works will be important. PCs will show their approval or disapproval based on a specific organization, like say that a Thrax Prince challenges a commoner to a duel, wants to fight as his own champion, over the commoner criticizing the Thrax Prince for being a crafter and selling his own wares in a shop. So the prince is breaking three different thematic taboos.

A vox update on the prince starts, and people link it to specific org principles (respect), in whether the person is taking actions that are contrary or supporting those principles, and that would (if successful) cause a gain or loss in respect to that org. Similarly, if they are causing harm or helping an org, that could cause a gain or loss in org affection. As I'm defining org reputation as actions that reflect on a core principle for an organization is the 'respect' score, while actions that help/harm the org members on a personal level is the 'affection' score.

These would run for an extremely long time (a month, probably), and it would not need to be about a single issue at all. So if during the time he admits to illegitimate children, fights in the street, scoffs publicly at the crown, steals a goat, that can just be added to the running count with different orgs who very deeply and passionately care about the growing scourge of goat theft.

So I'd manually define different principles of every single org in the game (Blackram will have to get goat theft as one of their principles now, I hope everyone realizes), and people would select from the list when they register approval or disapproval, and I'd just look over every vox at the end and delete any that aren't applicable before I do rolls.

ETA: By design, many core principles of orgs would be contradictory and create a web where gain in one would usually automatically cause a loss in another.

@faraday said in Managing Player Expectations:

The problem, to me, is what @Arkandel said earlier: It's the people who aren't reasonable who take up the majority of the effort. I disagree that this is a clear-cut disciplinary issue, because it's usually not somebody screaming at you. More often, it's somebody who is making your admin life perpetually difficult because they just can't seem to reconcile their tenacious expectations of how the game "should be" with how the game actually is.

I think I shouldn't have used the word 'disciplinary'. Since it conjures image of someone screaming and them being thrown out the door while flailing about, and that just doesn't happen very much. It's someone vaguebooking about a point a few times, or mild acts of passive aggression, or even less than that, just someone bringing up the point in a well meaning but ultimately really obnoxious way after it has been politely declined.

Those are frustrating, and I think most people that do it have no idea how taxing it is, how exhausting it is for a game runner doing something for fun has a sore point prodded over and over. Being the bad guy and feeling disproportionate in shutting it down will often solve it, but it's not fun to have to look/feel unreasonable.

I think we're talking about a few different things and they are getting a little conflated.

When I think of reasonable players and staff having differing expectations. Sometimes it's just a lack of clarity in what a game should be, where it's hard to present detail that would clear up misconceptions without overwhelming someone looking at the game. But sometimes it's just players wanting to add something that the owner never thought of, or considered, or take things in a different potential direction.

And if everyone's reasonable, then either the staffer can decide it's something they'd like to see and expand it, or it's not something they'd want to see or aren't interested in and decline to add it to the game, and then a reasonable player also doesn't badger the staffer, and is polite and courteous in bringing it up, and the staffer is polite and courteous in hearing about it, even if 20 different people have also suggested it 20 times before and it's getting really, really old.

The unreasonable ones are disciplinary stuff, and I think a different scope of discussion. But I think the, 'people after different kinds of RP' is an entirely different discussion from either of those things.

As a hobby, I don't think it's any secret we have a whole hell of a lot of introverts or people with social anxiety, and I mention this because it is not exactly hard for someone to just not get invested in a game. Someone plays, they get one RP partner, that RP partner quits, and maybe that player logs in once a week ever after and just idles in their room for forever. They just aren't engaged, and a lot of them linger forever kind of hoping someone else engages them, because going out and creating that engagement is very challenging and frankly scary to a ton of players. And more often than not, someone stuck in that position, of maybe finding a single thread of RP they value... those people are going to be written off by other players, generally unfairly.

I'm not like, a brilliant storyteller or writer or organizer, but I do think I might have a knack for engaging with people that are having trouble finding footing, which loops back to that other conversation about social scenes, and people's differing value in them. I think more often than not, a lot of players that are written off by other players as having niche interests just need to be engaged with, and they will respond accordingly and get invested in the game. I strongly think that the 'person that plays a game not meant for that kind of RP and refuses to engage' is so rare it might as well not really exist, but the 'person that has no idea how to get involved' is overwhelmingly common, and probably one of the biggest single issues that any game runner deals with.

It's super, super important to not mistake the latter for the former, in my opinion.

Arx - play.arxmush.org for website and play.arxmush.org port 3000, or IP 45.33.87.194:3000

@thesuntsar said in Arx: @clues:

@oldfrightful I'm pretty sure becoming one/fighting one/obtaining an army of them would solve a lot of my problems.

Trust me when I say that it wouldn't, without knowing how much you know about Arx werewolves.

@thatguythere Yeah, I think that's definitely true. A lot of older players are way more risk averse about not seeing their time wasted, a lot more protective of their time/hostile towards people that impose upon it, and also way, way less patient when they think they recognize patterns that have been problems for them in the past.

I don't blame people for this. It's understandable, even if I think sometimes it can be counterproductive. Like for example, the ad threads or idea pooling threads that turn super sharply negative really fast are symptomatic of that. Like I know it's easy to say everyone is old and cranky but it's more like, 'if people have been doing this for 20 years, and they see something that has failed multiple times being talked about, while they impatiently wait for something that they can have fun in, they get pissy unnecessarily at some poor game creator.'

I think that this stuff comes down to tradeoffs and just what staff are willing to deal with, and more importantly, what they enjoy doing. Like I worry that we'd drift into talking about design in a way of best practices, when a well run sandbox game with no metaplot could be infinitely better than a plot driven game that just isn't run well, and I think because of people's experiences on good games they might be more inclined to say, 'this is the best way to do it' when really it was just colored by that particular approach being well done.

So on balancing the need to be a protagonist that a lot of players are after, I really think of it as a general scale. I mean sure, if a single player out of 500 goes and kills the space slug and saves the world, other players might be cranky and jealous about that. If 100 out of the 500 do it, while there was 4 other also very relevant stories for each of the other hundred, then that mitigates complaints from anyone but a handful. And if staff doesn't want to deal with those kinds of headaches, then they either don't do it, or try to change the game to the point where the headaches are minimized.

Similarly I think of different tools as just tradeoffs. Like I just don't have a dark version of staff invisibility. I personally feel the cost in trust outweighs the gains of me being able to run around the grid and spontaneously create RP on people that don't suspect it that would enjoy the surprise. Conversely, I hide other information for narrative reasons that I think don't have the same kind of problems I want to avoid but have large gains, and I don't think this is a right or wrong thing, just preference by a staffer on their game.

@arkandel In a very broad sense, yeah. I mean if there's anything in any way to compete with, even if only one person feels competitive. Like take @faraday talking about kill boards in her game and how drama came from it. Some players would be like, 'oh hey I have X kills, cool' and don't care about how they fall in relation to others, while a couple feel a burning need to be #1 and are going to be huge dicks about it.

Discovery falls under the same thing. Some people want it because it's cool, while some feel competitive about feeling like they know the most, are the best at uncovering something, are the person known for doing something first. And some people can be perfectly healthy and constructive and fine while enjoying that. It's not that people feeling competitive drive is bad but a lot of MU players are just really terrible at doing it in a constructive way that makes them not be a dick about it.

So I'd more take your statement and make it even more broad, not so much rare and special, but -anything- that can be measured or have some metric that someone with a competitive drive can use as a basis for comparison, and story or the respect and admiration of their peers definitely fall under that. Just someone feeling competitive about, 'I run the best PRPs and am the most fun for RP and entertain the most people' isn't usually anywhere near as toxic, with some exceptions. (Spider, maybe?)