@goldfish said in Paragraphs, large scenes and visibility:
Still mad that my Sirius didn't look like Gary Oldman but WHATEVER)
If it helps, Gary Oldman doesn't always look like Gary Oldman either.
@goldfish said in Paragraphs, large scenes and visibility:
Still mad that my Sirius didn't look like Gary Oldman but WHATEVER)
If it helps, Gary Oldman doesn't always look like Gary Oldman either.
@bad-at-lurking said in Gamifying Plots:
I'd love to have that kind of time, but MUing is not a job and I'm fairly sure that if I stopped feeding him, my dog would eventually eat me.
You need to first figure out how to strike a balance between what you can invest into staffing for a game and the rest of your life. It's pretty much never a good idea to over-invest, since either your initial efforts will be taken for granted then they'll go to waste once the production drops off, or you'll burn out badly which isn't good for you or anyone else involved.
The unicorn solution is to find player Storytellers. Delegate tasks and let them run things too since then as your playerbase grows so do your plot-runners by association.
But how you will find them? Best of luck.
Just some thoughts here.
@Ganymede said in Eliminating social stats:
Basically, every pose calculated to arouse something in someone is going to need a roll, and that just doesn't happen. Do I personally care if a person rolls to check if my PC is lying? No, I don't, but I'm pretty easy-going. That said, if I'm interrupted every freaking pose, I'm going to get a bit testy.
If there was a central issue I find with social stats this is it; for one reason or the other they don't get used for the most part. I've often part of mixed (public and private) scenes for entire weeks, beginning to end, and saw maybe one dice roll on a specific lie - and all the other social attributes were just plain filler. When's the last time you saw a Socialize roll in a nWoD game versus how often your character socialized?
But a few more comments.
Although @Ghost is of course correct in that you can't just take a system and gut it by removing social attributes from them... that's not the intention. It's to create a system from scratch, made for a MU*, in which we're not just taking a chunk out of something and cross our fingers. Would it have the effect that good roleplayers will have an advantage? I'm inclined to agree - supplementing the edge they already have - but to be honest here if the worst sideeffect of such a change is "charismatic, good players are even more successful" then it's something I can live with.
Another note: Plots. It's a fact, not an opinion, that it's easier to run a physical challenge than a social one as a plot's foundation; in the time it takes to introduce the principle agents of a threat that a socially savvy character can defuse one could run three plots about beating the shit of the Orcs threatening the village. The practical effect of this discrepancy is simply that more combat plots are ran than social ones. So by natural selection we already cater more to one set of attributes than we do another, forcing players to choose which they are good at - not making them pick sounds like it could mitigate the issue.
Finally, I can't agree more that in the absence of social traits more tangible non-physical assets become essential for politics. There would absolutely need to be an economy of some sort (information, land, currencies, stuff that you want and which can be offered/withheld) to introduce consequences and entice deals, alliances and rivalries.
It really isn't an easy choice to make. In many ways it's easier to just leave Charisma in, tell your players 'hey, I got you a damn system, just use it!' and declare anyone who's not using it a borderline exploiter even though it's not very usable. That's the mentality I'm trying to avoid here, misplacing the burden of both effort and blame on players for systems which weren't ever designed to cover the use case they are expected to use them for.
We might be able to do better if we can shift the paradigm in a different direction.
@goldfish I'm one of those people who do all that; I pretype responses, am a fast typist and I read quickly. However it doesn't matter that much when it comes to playing with others; being a slow poser isn't an issue - being a sloppy or inconsiderate one is.
In other words take your time. If I have to wait 10 minutes (or sometimes more) to get a pose I'm more than fine with it as long as it's worth reading in the end. Cranking out my poses faster than that isn't supposed to signal others that they need to do the same.
You don't have to change your posing style to accommodate others. Now if it's only for your own convenience, making sure you don't miss important things or name-drops in others' poses then sure, that's something... but there shouldn't ever be external or even perceived pressure to alter how you do things if you'd rather not.
Plus frankly any scene with 6+ people in it will be a scrolling, spammy nightmare for most people. It comes with the territory.
I know how to deal with ambiance emits.
#gag.
@faraday said in Eliminating social stats:
@Arkandel Well unless I misread, you said it like a negative against social stats... like, they were useless because they never got rolled. I've never rolled my BSGU char's Dancing skill either, but her skill (or rather, lack thereof) has come up in several scenes. The problem isn't them not getting rolled, IMHO, the problem is when someone has Dancing:1 but RPs like they're going to win So You Think You Can Dance (or conversely has a char with Dancing:5 but their dance poses are cringe-worthy). Short of coding everything, I don't know how you ever really fix that problem (and even that probably won't work either). You can mitigate it somewhat with open sheets and letting players keep each other honest, but that only goes so far.
The problem I was addressing in this part of the thread wasn't whether people were roleplaying being better at a skill than they are, it was a comment by (I think) @Lain who said there are just those who can't play out a skill convincingly but that's okay because we're just roleplaying having such skills anyway. So it's the opposite of that - people who have a high IC social skill but can't match it through their poses.
And the root of that problem is that skills like dancing can be very safely abstracted even by people with little knowledge of how they work. I can't dance my way out of a paper bag (although that'd be amusing) but I could probably put together a pose that sounds like my character has some moves, but if I suck at being persuasive then I can't just abstract all that with the Persuasion skill because at some point my PC is gonna have to open his mouth and actually say things, things that you are going to have to read. There will be non-persuasive words involved. It will make you sigh.
That's what I meant.
@tinuviel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
@arkandel said in What's out there now and what has been attempted? A codebase discussion.:
a web-only MU engine
If it isn't telnet, is it MU*?
If I can roleplay in it, but better, I don't care what it is called.
A long time ago on a WoT MUD I was on they had implemented 'insanity messages' which were basically voices in your head.
The joke became that it wasn't characters being driven mad by those, it was players. So much spam. Especially if you stepped away from the PC for a few minutes then came back to screens worth of it.
I always thought it was really weird there were so few roleplaying D&D or Pathfinder MU* around given how popular they are on table-top.
@kumakun So much tends to be a tender topic for some that if we cared about it all we'd never talk about anything.
If it's on your mind, discuss it. Take what you can use from the input you get, and dismiss the rest.
Whether you have explicit rules or "don't be a jerk" policies it always has been and will continue to be up to staff to enforce them.
Nothing stops staff from intervening even if there's no explicit rule in place and someone's being a jerk. It's a universal principle; the people running the place are the ones the buck stops with. In MSB if someone steps out of line in some terrible way we haven't figured out it's not like we'd go "oh, shit, there's no rule about it - I guess they get away with it this time!".
There's nothing wrong with writing down specific policies per game. In fact as @surreality pointed out in some MU* that's necessary - the 'just walking around into private rooms' example was a good one.
But two thirds of the responsibility is on staff. The other third is on players who watch others get screwed over and tolerate it because it didn't happen to them.
I was going over my notes for an upcoming Eldritch story and I thought I'd toss this here, too.
If at all possible try to not tie plot advancement to anything time-sensitive. There's a high chance it will end in disappointment because it's so difficult to predict critical people's availability for it.
So for example the NPC you brought in to yell at the characters and remind them they need to act now or the world will end... don't do that unless you absolutely must. So many things can go wrong - maybe your computer fries, maybe a couple of key PCs' players get really busy at work and need some time off, and then you have to figure out why the world didn't end up ending after all.
It's much more efficient to keep the plot structure largely reactive with the PCs being the dynamic part that sets other elements reeling (so instead of "we need to interrupt the ritual tomorrow night at midnight!" use "we need to break in and destroy the cursed statue they plan to use in the ritual!"), with some leeway for you to still be able to prod the players into action so they can get off their ass and do something if they procrastinate.
@faraday said in Whatever Happened To Star Wars MU*s?:
@Arkandel said in Whatever Happened To Star Wars MU*s?:
It's like going to a fantasy MUSH and only being allowed to play peasants until you can earn the right to roll a Lord or Lady.
Except in the "Rebels" era, it's more like going to a fantasy MUSH and not getting to play the king. It's not like Jedi are an entire class of citizenry like lords/ladies, they're crazy-rare as an intrinsic part of the setting. Sure you could do KoTOR or whatever, but for some folks (like me) it's the rebels vs. empire that are interesting, not jedis running around rampant.
Oh, for sure. I'm not even trying to say every game should fit my tastes - just that it was why I didn't want to play in one that didn't even give me the option to play something I wanted.
Mind you, Star Wars is by far not the only setting with rare concepts yet those are often what players want to play. Playable male channelers in the Wheel of Time might not fit certain timelines either and I'd understand why a MUSH might want to not want them as PCs. Once again though if a player wanted to play that concept and it wasn't available... well, I wouldn't blame them for passing on it too.
In my opinion it's a design choice in the same vein as not spreading the playerbase too thin. While the average population in many MU* is low staff need to take that into consideration when they're creating a game; can the theme support (and how many) of the cool concepts we've see in movies and TV series so far - clone stormtroopers, Force users of different varieties, Mandalorian warriors and bounty hunters, smugglers, droids, pilots... all of that stuff?
"No" is a valid choice. All I would ask is that it's a deliberate one. And if it is, it might be one of the answers to this thread's main question.
@thenomain said in Earning stuff:
The Reach had a very long-standing history of staff abusing players, and headstaff (of which I was one, even when it was happening) doing nothing about it. This makes staff look ineffectual because they were ineffectual. If staff wasn't excellent to each other and to players, why should players be excellent?
Another factor I think is quite underrated is we are seeing fewer MU* ran by enormous staff, and for that matter, being staff constituting a reward for players rather than... a job description. It's harder for things to be lost in the shuffle or for politics to emerge from a small, tightly knit team than an enormous group of them who're barely able to communicate with each other effectively.
Conversely game runners either take or are forced to take more responsibility for their actions - we've introduced a notion of accountability, albeit slowly, over the last ten years or so. It used to be staff were beyond criticism but that's no longer the case, which is a significant cultural shift in the right direction. Even when they protest they don't care (and they do, a lot) staff are seeing their players having expectations from them other than paying the bills.
@Seraphim73 What I like about elseworlds is that while you can change the cast you are still keeping the rules.
It basically depends of course on the reasons you picked whatever setting for in the first place but IMHO if it was for the cast of characters itself then probably it wasn't a great pick for a MU*.
But if it's to keep WoT's channeling system, Sanderson's : Allomancy/Feruchemy/Hemalurgy, maybe Butcher's Dresdenverse creature types... then you can definitely get away with a whole lot and still get a treasure chest full of toys to play with.
@Autumn You can't take my righteous indignation from me!
@saosmash said in Development Thread: Sacred Seed:
@arkandel Fair.
The only reason I said (?) anything is because you don't really want to play the IC consequences game with these guys. It doesn't work, that's literally their playground and how they push this stuff on people who don't want it - it's the MUSH equivalent of the "if you don't like it, sue me!" approach, daring their intended audience to be on display. They'll debate it to death, nitpick everything and nothing involved will be any fun for anyone else.
It's simply cleaner to separate IC and OOC discipline completely. Don't do this, or we'll show you the door. Done. No trial, no bruhaha, just a swift ban and life moves on without you.
@Collective So do so. Spend as much time as a trainee as you think you should (and you're getting RP from those cute blushing nobices pretending to not watch the sparring), then when you are ready for your guy to hit the real world, grab a color-shifting cloak on the way out and graduate.
I don't think this is a game-wide issue as much as an organic way certain groups get together.
That is, no staff can really define let alone try to regulate a particular type of writing, but we all have our preferences. If I know someone's compatible with my style and I like them then I probably end up playing with them more, and others less so.
What you would call a wordsmith or good story teller might be someone else's nightmare for a number of reasons - they might not be detailed enough, or they are too slow, or they make typos, or... whatever. There are a myriad variations of what we like and of how we come across regardless of our earnest intentions; I might think I'm witty and suave yet some deluded souls might find my poses pretentious and overbearing.
Now... if you're asking for specific recommendations I'm sure you've come to the right place to ask.
@lotherio said in Managing Player Expectations:
I think what it comes down to is: its not the content (or genre) but the audience. They're looking for other players.
Oh, I agree. It was clear when people flocked to TR (as I imagine they are going to Arx now, as they will go to whatever is the Next Big Thing) because it's where other players are whether they like what it's about or not. But while fully assimilating yourself into a culture shouldn't be obligatory, not being disruptive should be.
If I come to your table and you're running a light-hearted silly high fantasy D&D campaign I don't get to insist on eviscerating my enemies before I bathe in their entrails and eat them, and if I do my excuse can't possibly be that hey, yours is the only game in town. Not while I'm eating your pizza. That just makes me a douche.
I think of late what it feels like most of all is the amount of investment and much as in life, whether we admit it or not, a lot of players look for minimal investment with greater odds on return of the investment. Just I think MU-wise, return doesn't quite work that way for RP; perhaps coded return sure, there are games with measurable returns to investment with code but that's not quite the same as RP I think?
The curious part in this though is that while the primary motivation for these types is socialization they are acting in a decisively antisocial manner. They are, at the same time, going to games specifically seeking the company of other players but also engage them in a way that breaks that game's norms which distances them from what those players are doing.
It's an exercise in frustration for all involved parties; themselves, staff, and other people.