Another question is, do you (the general-you) want to draw from the established pool of superhero MU* players or are you interested in catching the attention of newcomers who might have been interested in the genre but never played it, and who might decide to try it out if capes and spandex came baked into some of the new generation toys (Ares, etc)?
@taika said in Do we need staff?:
@Ganymede - Except I know for a fact Rex/Ashur/Sovereign was on Eldritch playing as a demon.
How much did he get away with?
That's what matters. No one can guarantee bad people won't even be able to log on - especially before anyone knows who they are.
@Auspice said in Pokemon Go:
I'm 100% with you. I mean, the most upsetting thing about that Koffing at the Holocaust museum wasn't that it was there... It's that enough people were in that place, playing the game, that random chance let it happen.
Also, schools aren't generally going to have Pokestops/gyms. Some might. But Niantic has generally avoided schools (esp. elementary & middle) having them (so, y'know, there's no issues with adults lingering about). Since polling places are often schools...
But seriously. The excuses people already give to not vote? ('I don't feel like getting up early.' 'I forgot to ask for the day off.') Pokemon wouldn't magically make non-voters suddenly vote.
Niantic has considerable experience with this - I'd say more than anyone else could have - since they're also the company behind Ingress.
It's just impossible to predict all sensitive situations especially when it's something as new as virtual and real worlds colliding, there's very little precedent for any of this. Hell, companies in well established markets with decades of history behind them make mistakes which, in retrospect, are pretty obvious yet at the time no one saw them.
The one from the top of my head is the controversy around X-Men: Apocalypse where they had huge billboards up of what came down to a man choking a woman. Yes, when it's put in these terms we're left scratching our heads going "how they hell did they think that was appropriate?" but that's only in retrospect, as they probably just... didn't think of it at the time. Same as the Holocaust museum thing ("we'll put Poke-stuffs at museums and get good PR by sending kids to educative places like that! woo-hoo!"), it just didn't occur to them.
Everyone fucks up. 
A couple of suggestions:
Mention the game's name in your advertisement thread's title
Bring up some basic 'technical' facts about the game itself - codebase, gaming system, playable characters, URLs to the wiki if any, that kind of stuff.
@tinuviel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
The objection is to using third-party sources when discussing rules-as-written. It isn't pedantry, it's requiring decent and generally constant accuracy. There's no guarantee that when/if this thread is read a year from now by someone new the information in that wiki will still be accurate, given it's neither a published source nor one any of us control.
They aren't even rules-as-written because they weren't developed for MU*. They were aimed for table-top - there are no official rules for what we need, thus no appeal to authority can work.
I do agree the very idea of trying to create any kind of exhaustive list of social rolls' effects is an exercise in madness though. In my eyes there are only two ways to go at it:
Don't allow its use on PCs (which doesn't solve the problem completely, and devalues the skills, but at least it takes creeping out of the equation).
Accept that interpreting what the roll results do falls to the target's player as they will differ from one PC to the other. Yes, that means some people will play being unphased by them, which you can't do with a combat roll. Them's the breaks.
I suppose there's a third way - removing social rolls - but that'd gut the system, so I don't really count it as a real solution to anything.
@Coin said in Pokemon Go:
No, I know it's illogical to demand that of them ahead of time or with any level of certainty. But now that there has been a case (or more), they should look into diminishing it as much as possible. Or not. Whatever.
Pokemon ain't out here, so.
Given their spawning chances are based on algorithms (i.e. they are automated to a great degree based on collected data usage, since the job of going over it manually to hand-pick locations around the entire world would have been a freakin' gigantic, expensive project on its own) I'd say their best approach might be to selectively blacklist certain locations. That shouldn't be too hard so it'll probably happen at some point just to silence some of the critics.
But man, so much negativity already over social media. I get it's the popular thing and everyone loves to bitch at popular things but my Facebook stream is full of people declaring in outrage how they are not playing P:Go as if that means they're special, and are taking offense at everything about it - from people 'looking at their phones' (which is completely new and never happened before) to 'parks being overcrowded with people', to how this free game no one is making them install will expose their private information - just before they post pictures of their latest piercing, of course.
@mietze Actually now that I thought about it, some issue are typically trivial to address in smaller group but increasingly tricky to tackle as we add people to them:
Sharing a vision of what the game is about and what PC concepts look like; with four players you can chat and come to an agreement this is a low magic setting playing a rugtag group of peasants in situations way over their heads. As you add more folks you'll also start getting pitched more edge cases - noblewomen in disguise, excommunicated paladins, former assassins, etc.
Not having enough TLC to go around by the GM. With a party of four more or less everyone gets to shine. As the ratio of GMs to players worsens so does the chance someone is left sitting on their thumbs.
Administrative issues and logistics increase with the playerbase's size. There's a higher risk someone won't get along, you need to track down more stuff than just +sheets, juggling timezones and availabilities gets tricky, and as you add more GMs (well, staff) they need to be managed to like everything else.
Continuity in general is something MU* don't handle very well because staff are so transient. A typical table-top campaign rarely survives its GM's departure but staff gets replaced on games all the time, leaving storylines dangling and character arcs unresolved. Even the style of play can be quite different based on who's running a plot which isn't something more intimate campaigns (often ran and involving well-knit groups who know each other well) have to struggle with.
@ganymede said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
@arkandel said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
The more a social system tries to do the less successful is poised to become.
I whole-heartedly disagree with the statement because what I think you mean to say is:
The more a social system tries to do the less likely players will want to use it.
I think the core of our disagreement here lies in the fact I see no difference between those two statements.
A system can't be successful unless players buy into it.
@HorrorHound Be aware there is a sad flipside to this; the passport/driver license thing is being looked at by poorly trained, highly overworked people which makes them prone to social engineering attempts.
For example a year or so I temporarily lost control of my Blizzard account. All someone had to do was get their hands on my real name knowing I also play WoW (which isn't hard since I'm posting on social media about the game), then they took an image of a random driver's license from a province I've never even been to let alone issued any government papers in, photoshopped the name on there and added an equally random picture of some guy on it then sent it in as 'proof' that I wanted my password changed. Blamo!
I restored it easily enough afterwards but you get the point. Imagine if it was something more serious or critical than a game account?
I think you're on the right track here. Historical accuracy doesn't work on MU* anyway since not everyone is an expert and players shouldn't struggle too much about menial details of everyday life - plus I like your emphasis on giving mortal women a bit more agency, too, since they'll account for a large portion of the playerbase.
As long as you can pull up an 101 about where the setting stands (are there washrooms? what do people wear? what are the rights of Roman citizens versus other ethnicities?) you should be fine, and you can focus on bloodsuckers versus toga-wearing werewolves or what have you.
@misadventure said in Social Stats in the World of Darkness:
MU* RP is more socially oriented than (almost all) tabletop for many reasons. Moreso than deadly danger, it should offer interesting choices, and make for an interesting story.
MU* and table-top are simply different mediums. Comparing them is a task bound to fail the same way discussing a movie versus the book it was derived by would.
In table-top something is, or had better be, always happening. That's what the ST is there for, after all; downtime can and should exist but it's kind of like a cinematic experience where these pockets of exposition and character development are then thrown into perpetual upheavals.
MUSHes, and I don't mean that in a bad way, are kind of the soap operas of roleplaying. Most of the time nothing is 'happening' per se, and the vast majority of a character's played life is spent talking about or dissecting either the official storyline (rather than actively participating in or directly affecting it), or of course expanding the relationships between themselves and others.
That's conversely the exact reason social skills need to be really easy to use. It's something you'd have to put into play all the damn time, so if you have to go consulting tables (let alone involving staff) and shit the boat has already sailed.
@silentsophia said in World of Warcraft: Legion:
I don't honestly know. I keep debating, but my favorites are BM Hunter and Ice Mage, so I don't know how useful I would be.
For starters these days all classes' usefulness is normalized... given equal skill they won't fall too far from each other in effectiveness, and no one spec has anything no one else does. Blizzard's philosophy has been 'bring the player, not the class' for a few years now.
For another the idea is to group up and have some fun, not to go do Mythic raiding and world firsts, so who cares?
@mietze said in Aesca Sneak Peak:
I think you should prepare for a huge influx and rush at the beginning, and then just do the best you can to choke down drinking from the firehose until a good number of people will wander away in the first few months, and then you'll know what your base size is more realistically. This surge can be a real gamekiller/burnout machine if you are not mentally prepared for how you will deal.
Because I do absolutely believe you will have a huge rush at the beginning at the very least!
The surge can also backfire if it causes delays if not enough of CGen is automated. A game's own popularity can kill it if a bunch of players are having to wait too long to be approved and give up.
I'm pleased to see a wider demographic of younger folks than I expected. Not sure how newbies get into MUSHing these days but somehow it's happening.
Oh and for all that is holy... automate some off-site backups. Don't just create a tarball of your installation and a database dump to store on the game's host itself (although do that, too, for convenience) but make sure you're downloading regular snapshots into at least one other machine - two different machines is even better.
Also to be a purist... until you've verified you can restore everything from scratch using those backups, they don't count.
I think that's a fine philosophy, but the devil's in the details. "Sure I'll just pop on the stagecoach to go to my cousin's wedding down in Texas" is a perfectly fine story to one person and a "ZOMG that makes absolutely no sense in historical context" bugaboo to the next person.
Of course, but let me quote myself:
@arkandel said in Historical settings:
All 'Hollywood' means to me is that we shouldn't let gameplay get bogged down in unnecessary details. The game oughtn't be about the minutiae of history but about characters, plots, pace - all the usual elements of good storytelling.
Obviously (?) each game runner needs to know where their line is and draw it in no uncertain terms. Again to me geography and transportation, as great factors as they've historically been, should only present occasional hiccups to people's ability to RP.
So in your example it's not so much that I'd have that stagecoach fly through hundreds of miles overnight to let your PC go to her cousin's wedding, but I'd do my damnest so that's never a necessary logistical nightmare to handle. It's why I highly recommend single-city games rather than ones set in a sprawling world where characters need to travel extensively - it's because they then isolate themselves from the rest of the playerbase.
@MarsGrad said in Dark/Low-Fantasy with a Witcher-esque Feel:
Setting aside, I'm still shopping around for RPG systems, staff, and feedback so suggestions for any of the three are more than welcome! Thanks!
I'll provide the usual pieces of feedback which apply to most settings.
Pick the mechanics and world that excites and drives you the most. Until the project is well underway it will live and die on your interest level, after all. If your momentum dies, so will it, but staff and players will look twice at a creative, energetic game creator with vision and energy.
Keep answering the question "what will players actually do in this game once they log on?". An idea that looks amazing on paper but doesn't somehow end up translating to players having stuff to do may be a flawed one. For example is there stuff to do when no plots exist to throw monsters at PCs? Is there room for stuff to do for non-combat PCs? And so on.
Good luck!
@mietze said in Historical settings:
But I find the fantasy- flexible- sorta-based-on- "history" /themes/ over actual historical stuff, personally. That's not the thought exercise you laid out though, ark.
Yeah, by design though. It's certainly easier to do those since you're able to handwave a lot of headaches - don't want racism? It's gone! Accuracy? To what, the pseudo-Roman setting with your own hybrid pantheon?
For example I've been toying with the idea of a WoD game set in Casablanca era 1940 in my head. It probably won't go past that but I'm loving the idea of a Germany-backed new government ran by Nazi vampires and Aryan supremacist Pure while the locals try to survive and protect their own people. But I could take a hell of a lot more permissions with history then than if I actually tried to ran a more realistic game where the King is trying to protect the local Jewish population and somehow weather the storm until the Allies turn the tides.
Would it be more fun? To some, maybe. To me, definitely not. But it would be trickier to pull off, that's for damn sure.
