Posts made by Arkandel

@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.

@mietze @mietze said in Historical settings:

So that's one thing that you'd need to take a hard look at. What DO you want in the scope of your game? Then be honest about it.

I think one of the early hardships involved in setting up a game in a period you're clearly excited about ("oh boy that golden age of Rome under Augustus!!1!") is then allowing your players some agency both in terms of not knowing everything you - in your excitement - do, or interpreting them the same way. Some might care for the constant education, correcting their pig latin or resolving somewhat minor anachronisms but probably most won't match what's locked inside your head. Not exactly.

In other words, and to generalize wildly, there are three types of players:

• People who will play any era as they picture it in their heads. They'll play a stereotype - a "fighter", a "medic", a "businessman" as appropriate, but won't try to get too ambitious or take too many liberties. Those are probably most MU*'s bread-and-butter.

• Folks who know or are willing to try more with theme on a meta level. They will set your culture as much or more than staff will, since they often set the IC tone; they'll play deviants, mavericks, important political figures and so on. It's these guys staff need to win over and work with more than anyone.

• Finally there are those who might or not know as much as the ones above but they will be more disruptive because that is pretty much their goal. Play them in a medieval setting and they'll try to invent gunpowder, create corporations in all but name where the very model doesn't exist, try to revolutionize military strategy decades in advance.

These groups all need attention, but both the approach and degree of education and hand-holding they require is vastly different, and it needs to be handled without taking their ability to make meaningful, interesting choices.

@ziggurat said in Midnight MUSH:

There's a tendency to throw around terms like 'success' or 'thriving' or the like when it comes to discussing MUs

The most common metric of success (at least in conversations like this) is the absence of failure. Are you logging on and there are multiple people online who don't seem to be idlying? Have you never seen threads about their staff screwing up too much? If you created a character did CGen seem to churn along at a reasonable pace? Well, then it's successful!

But in terms of individuals it's a crapshoot. Hell, even 'are people having fun' is just an empty phrase as usually it means 'people I personally know and asked'. In many cases it can be completely arbirtrary criteria that determine it; 'that superhero MUSH is terrible because the Flash is Wally West and not Barry Allen'.

To me longevity counts. I don't care too much for flashes in the pan kind of games; run it for a year+ without losing your players, then you're doing something right. I'd maintain that even for games I actually don't care for, or whose staff I believe to be unethical, because it's difficult to argue with the results.

@aria said in Critters!:

Pasha is an adorable BabyCat. Pasha is also a rampaging asshole cat.

FTFY

@faraday said in Historical settings:

I had fun, personally, but I don't know how "historical" it was in the end.

Again this is only my opinion, but if I ran a MU* and someone told me "hey, I have fun here but I don't know how historical it is" I'd take it as a win - any day.

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.

@faraday said in Historical settings:

@seraphim73 I don’t think “Hollywood” is an adequate framing adjective for a game, because it could mean anything from Band of Brothers (highly accurate without being a documentary) to Inglorious Basterds (total fantasy) to Kellys Heroes (vaguely plausible but not meant to be taken seriously) and a dozen other levels in between.

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.

An easy example is clothing. It should be fine if someone describes themselves in a fashion that's not quite from that exact period, or require materials that wouldn't get used for another thirty years, etc because they want to wear a fancy dress or cool suit. If it wouldn't raise eyebrows in a TV show it should be fine for a MUSH; sure, don't put Air Jordans on your WW1 veteran with PTSD but it's probably okay to wear a hat that'd only get popularized during the Prohibition era.

That's what I mean by it, at least. Others' takes may vary.

@aria A while ago me and my buddies were changing after a baskeball game and they saw I had Hulk underwear on.

One of them went "so when you take it off you turn into Bruce Banner!".

You know, that's a fucking good burn. I'm not even mad.

@auspice A little hack I'm using to get out of that terrible interface is to use an address like this instead:

https://blahblah.salesforce.com/500

It escapes some of the horror and replaces it with a mild headache instead.

@wizz In that case (... sigh, unintended pun) I hate some parts of SalesForce so much since we're using it for reasons unknown, and I work with it on a daily basis.

• The internal tabs intefrace. What the hell, that's borderline abusive to the users, who designed that UI?
• If I add long lines - such as when I paste a freakin' log, which is often - the output doesn't wrap, but even if it's in a single comment I need to scroll horizontally forever more.
• The fact I need to add myself as a team member to be notified if someone alters the case else I'll need to open it manually to find out.
• The search function. Sometimes I'd take nodebb's over it, and that's saying something.

Argh.

@auspice We are derailing this poor thread in the most unexpected way possible.

@wizz Jira is okay. We're migrating from SalesForce to Jira HelpDesk which is at least an upgrade, too.

To avoid further distractions from the original thread this came up let's discuss this in more detail (and, hopefully, constructively).

How would you do historical settings justice? In the context of this let's assume it's anything before WW2, just so that things were different enough in terms of international or local politics, technological levels, social structures and the such.

Let's also exclude 'pure' fantasy settings only loosely based on real life. Steampunk Victorian Age, medieval fantasy, etc would be outside of scope; we'd be discussing setups that seek to at least approximate if not achieve a degree of accuracy for the depicted setting.

For example:

• Just how much historical accuracy should be the goal?

• How/do you inform/educate your players on such very broad fields of knowledge?

• How much leeway should you allow characters in terms of their personalities compared to the times (liberals in conservative settings, racists, inventors pushing the boundaries of anachronism, etc).

• Would you allow history to be altered by the players' actions?

Add your own too, this is just a few things from the top of my head.

Discuss!

We're now available over https, thanks to Let's Encrypt.

Please do not mistake this for an open invitation to share sensitive information over MSB. It's still a bad idea, just marginally less so now than five minutes ago.

Fate.

And the smell of fresh popcorn.

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.

@auspice What did management say when you asked those same questions?

As it's oh-so clear from this thread alone, one of the biggest issues anyone opening a WoD MUSH has to face is how nearly everyone has their own, sometimes mutually exclusive, opinion of what it ought to be about.

@ganymede said in Reno is closing! ....Or is it?:

I think Arkandel is implying that changing settings may not solve underlying issues that made Reno unattractive to some players.

I mean I kinda think that, but I didn't want to go into any detail on an advertisement thread.

I am however genuinely interested in seeing what the new game's staff's thoughts are about this. Obviously it's a hell of a lot work to create a new grid, alter spheres, probably modify/add code... so they must have really good reasons for shutting down the Old Thing and open a New Thing.

So I thought those reasons could be relevant, and that they might want to inform potential players about them.

@scorn said in Reno is closing! ....Or is it?:

But this time, we can't ignore the wind. We've run out of sharp and pointy things to throw at it. Our voices are hoarse from all those "Fuck you, wind!"s. Reno's contract with Kydance is up, the first of the year.

What are you planning to do with the MUSH's new incarnation that you couldn't do with the previous one?