Best posts made by Arkandel

@insomnia Supernatural is so rich and it's so easy to cross it over with other pop culture genres and add tropes to it, it's probably ideal for a MUSH. My caveat above was pretty much the only hiccup I can think of.

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I've proposed in the past integrating this info in the wantrp command. So when you turn wantrp on, you add a sentence or two of the type of RP you'd be up for, and then people scanning the list have a better idea of why they might want to interact with you.

Another thing that can be offered (but with care to not violate anyone's privacy, it should be opt-in and very visibly when set) would be to check the log and timestamps of the last X poses remotely.

So let's say I take a look at +scenes and spot you're in a scene with Bob and Sue. If I can see the past 2 poses from each of you that gives me an idea on whether it's to my liking. On top of it if I notice Bob and Sue are taking 25 minutes to pose each then I can make an informed decision on if I have enough time to do anything meaningful in it.

3. The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

Games have too mush XP period, but that's grumpy old me speaking.

Aside from the amount I think auto-XP is almost meaningless. XP should be something to drive you into doing certain things; that's basically the crux of everything we're discussing here - ways and means to get people Out There Doing Things, yet the most classic tool in a game-runner's arsenal has been reduced to a cron job every Sunday night... for no great reason that I can see.

I've debated having an NPC roster so that players can just grab low-level NPCs and use them for quick scenes and such.

Yeah, or an easy generator on the web to create one on the fly. In my Werewolf example do you need a hostile Rank 2 spirit a party of 3 can take down? You should be able to go to a form, fill this out and it spits out the stats. Done.

It's all fine and good to say that players should be proactive, but when you give them nothing to be proactive about and no tools to be proactive with, what do you expect other than idling?

Nothing, and that's why all those countless clones-of-a-clone sandbox WoD games failed for example. Their runners for some reason thought if they just picked THE RIGHT CITY OF DARKNESS it'd work out, but it doesn't.

@Thenomain I think people are more prone to being upset/losing their minds if they car about the material at hand - their origin doesn't much matter as much as their treatment.

For instance one of my peeves about Batman vs Superman was how poor a detective Bats was in it; come on, the world's greatest detective and someone who clearly knows his identity has been sending him clues and letters for months but he didn't figure it out? It's a very minor issue in a movie riddled with larger plot holes (although the imagery and scope resonated well with me otherwise) but I was irked.

Either way though I wouldn't have cared at all if I didn't like the character. If they screwed up... dunno, a comic book I don't read or a manga property turned into a movie (since I don't watch manga) it'd be irrelevant to me.

@pyrephox said in Mismatched themes and expectations:

As to why? Mostly just that. Everyone has something that really revs their engine, and barring strong guidance from a GM, a lot of players will want to bring that into every game they play.

Correct, and it's so hard to even inform your players what you would like to be portrayed let alone distinguish between them simply being creative and trying to think outside the box - which is a wanted commodity - and disrupting what you want portrayed in the first place.

For instance consider a post-apocalyptic setting. The idea staff have in their heads might be something hardcore, dealing with resource depravation and the trauma of losing their way of life, but I come along and I'm interested in playing out how to return to a civilized state; maybe I'm playing a scientist who knows how to make solar panels, and my goal is to turn the rough settlement into a Flintstones-like utopia.

How does staff reconcile the two visions, or should they? Is it better that I get The Talk, or to deal with it IC as I'm presented with the challenges inherent in such a difficult task? Should I be allowed to be successful and, if so, to what degree?

Ultimately where is the line between me trying to play out something I think is cool, and turning the game into something its runners don't?

@tinuviel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

If you want to reward players, don't use XP. Find something else.

Okay, that's a fair point you and @faraday made. More carrots would be good - something with an in-game effect to draw characters out should work. It'd be best if whatever it is scalable; not to diminish what @Apos and others do but (for example) coming up with meaningful secrets on a huge scale is more work than many game-runners intend to be part of.

For some unfathomable reason players like achievements, too, or other purely cosmetic thingies without any effect at all. For all those weirdos meaningful RP participation could be a source of those (although 'meaningful' would need to be defined somehow).

There definitely does. The two biggest hurdles here are 1) People like me that don't want to run stuff, and 2) player-run plots being seemingly immaterial. The former isn't ever going to be solved, as it's not really a problem. We're there to play, not work at a thing, and that's something that just has to be accepted.

Ah-ah, you're extrapolating on that one. For example I love running PrPs, it's not work but something I enjoy doing. The issue in my case is knowing how much freedom I have to do some cool things too and not just minor also-ran plots, and not having my own character penalized in the process due to the opportunity cost of STing scenes.

The second, however, can be worked at. Many times, in my experience, I've seen player-run plots be basically ignored when it came to the further development of whatever metaplot that's going on. People aren't going to run plots that don't matter.

Yes, that's a big thing. Staff really need to plan ahead for PrPs and allow them to have an impact; if I run a 4-story PrP with dozens of characters in them I expect there to be a payoff for them. In many cases staff in general didn't even know those things happened let alone allow important key figures to count them for things like gaining status, gaining promotions, etc.

@Cobaltasaurus This game must be very confusing for grumpy people. Telling us nerds to get off our asses and go outside doesn't have the same ring to it any more.

@wildbaboons Concealed from the player. So I just type +roll strength+brawl and the code spits the outcome back at me, that's my favorite.

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I agree, and disagree, with the amount of work. I think you're front loading your work with something like this.

Costs: Additional up front work of writing the scenarios, designing the flows, tracking the results of the scenarios and communicating

Pros: Instead of needing to 'run things' 3 times a week, you may have one day a week of 'work' in doing the above.

For myself, I think the trade-off isn't the worst ever.

We might need to come to MSB's infamous agree-to-disagree state here.

Generally speaking it's far harder and more labor-intensive to communicate with and coordinate STs than to run scenes yourself. It simply is - there are all kinds of efficiencies which as staff you can develop over time when you're experienced at running plot, starting with:

• simply knowing the rules (in many cases being the one who made them in the first place)
• understanding the combat system (many perspective STs I've spoken to have mentioned this as the reason they want to but don't)
• having the players' respect (fewer people try to go over your head to 'make sure you're right about this ruling')
• finding out exactly what happened (the log might not show incorrect rolls or use of mechanics, misleading pages, etc),
• and of course dealing with actually malevolent players which on their own can send you spinning your wheels for a long time.

I think the key to all of this is getting that early momentum going. Once you have it things become so much simpler; engaged players whose characters are already interested and have a stake in things will ask you questions, point out ways to enrich your plots, can easily run something on the spot for you if you ask them since OOC they already know a lot about the situation, etc. When you don't need to chase them down but they are coming to you then you got'em - but the first few weeks, sometimes months, require a lot of constant vigilance and grooming to the point of micromanagement.

Most games don't have the staff who can do that. It's easy to spot, too, when there's a surge of activity early and then the momentum dies down as people sit on their thumbs. In my opinion the first month after opening is critical for a MUSH; it's too easy to get the kiss of death from a surge of characters getting created followed by nothing at all; once the surge is spent if there's nothing else going on... well, things get tougher from then on.

@Ganymede said in Good or New Movies Review:

Still, better than Guardians of the Galaxy.

No way.

@faraday said in Dice Mechanics:

@arkandel said in Dice Mechanics:

Concealed from the player.

LOL - have you actually tried that?

Hey, the question was what we prefer. That's what I prefer!

Wow, this thread happened really fast.

So the idea has been so far to create a wiki in which ads could be posted by game staff, and those would include links to the forum in the Constructive or (if one exists) the Hog Pit threads about those games.

Once there is a volunteer to create the wiki we'll try that schema out since, as it's obvious, the current way does not work as well as it should.

We can lock threads when they are first created here, too, but there are drawbacks in the approach since this is a forum. For example there is no categorization whatsoever (per genre, beta/fully open, possibly other tags as well).

So you can be the change you want in the world by stepping up! There's been a post on the Announcement section asking for a volunteer for a short while now, and the position is still unfilled.

@Auspice The way - and reason - I play the game is still the same as Ingress; it gives me something to do while I walk or hike.

The idea of spoofing it is, to me, absurd because if I'm at my PC there are many (many!) far superior games I could be playing - why bother with Pokemon Go unless I'm outside?

@ixokai said in Humble Bundle: Digital Ocean Credit:

git GUI

Heresy.

Witches have been burned for less.

@meg That's what the peeves threads are for!

Look, I know this is an issue. It's not one of those things where we all need to agree-to-disagree. I'm not happy our own rules are not being consistently enforced; perhaps I need to hire one more moderator but at this point it might be more that system itself that needs redoing.

I am hoping the wiki will improve on game ads by providing us with options we don't currently have.

If anyone's been into the gunpowder-and-magic thing, The Autumn Republic is now out. Pretty solid read.

@apos said in 'Inspired by' rather 'This Work: The Mu':

I think that having an original setting that draws upon conventions is rewarding, though I do think it takes a really large investment of time and you'll never really be 'done' in explaining the world.

For me the greatest issue with original settings is that player buy-in is hard. A MU* needs to have way more work put into it both preemptively (setting up a wiki, in-game help files, etc) and reactively in terms of staff answering questions and addressing thematic discrepancies while being in tune with each other for it to function. It's sometimes a lot of work to ask of a newcomer to do *before they know if they like it enough to stay.

In comparison a "New 52" DCU MUSH is way easier in many regards. You are attracting players who're fans coming in and who have a pretty decent idea of what's happening right off the bat. Your major characters are known and recognizable, their powersets more or less set, and no one is asking "hey do cellphones exist on this game?". It's just easier to recruit since the minimum required effort put upfront is lower.

So that's a big factor.

@theonceler Yes.

@Auspice I just wish they'd introduce actual new, fun features to the game. Ever since it launched they've worked on server stability, which is great, but nothing new fun to do. Appraise is so utterly useless I can't even - where's trading? Or fighting with your buddies' Pokemon?

@magee101 said in Gamifying Plots:

@arkandel its a little more than that. Clqiues tend to be groups that alienate players that are not part of their group, have high barriers for entry, and tend to give far too many fucks about other groups or individuals to the point of bullying.

Sure, of course they are, but my point is distinguishing the difference between that and a group of friends who're just playing and sticking together is a very subjective deal.

With that in mind:

@bad-at-lurking said in Gamifying Plots:

the plot tokens can be a useful meta-currency for rewarding behavior we want to see or for taking up roles we want to see filled

That's a good idea, assuming you guys have enough resources to make it work in the mid/long term. The meta-currency idea is better - I think - than the custom plots one simply because it gives players more flexibility; some will have access to pocket GMs to run things for them if need be, but they might be attracted by the currency aspect.

I advise you to think of tangible 'roles' in advance though and monitor how they can be taken, or how attractive they will be in comparison both to each other but also to 'free' ones.

@thenomain said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

Either 'ad and updates by the poster only', or make it part of the constructive forums in general.

It's already been done. I prefer the wiki route but it will need to wait until the personnel exists for it.

In the mean time I wanted to publicly praise you for one thing, dude. When you fuck up, you own it, and where you know you're flawed you acknowledge it.

Not everyone here has the self awareness or nerve to do as much.