@surreality It also probably becomes easier to recruit help from players. You may be busy running events leading up to the finale with the Big Bad #1 but the precursor scenes to Big Bad #2 might be done in more minor incidents you can contract out as PrPs without even having to disclose that much information which might spoil the next arc for them.
Whenever I warn someone of Rock's prey drive because he's going to be in the vicinity of their small creature, I frequently get a very dismissive, "Oh, my pet can handle themselves." It makes me want to shake them and point out it's not a dick waving contest, I genuinely don't want him to decide that the animal in his vicinity needs to go in his mouth.
As the owner of an otherwise lovely terrier with deep anger management issues... warning people is just a minor thing on the side.
Controlling your dog at all times is the main thing; there's no amount of 'but I told you so' that can fix an open wound after the fact.
So I'd pick her up if other dogs were around, always (always) have her on a leash, etc.
@surreality said in Sin City Chronicles:
It also means that later plots and major changes to the game world can happen fairly readily from major plot arcs like this: the outcome of one will understandably have an impact on things later.
One of the things I disliked about Arx - and I'm not shitting on the game right now, it was ajust that I just didn't like how it affected players - is that everything was single-mindedly pointed at the direction of a specific war... for months. And months. I would run PrPs about other issues related but not exactly about it then got paged by people asking 'what this has to do with the war'. Someone else explicitly said on a channel that if a scene wasn't about it then it was a waste of time.
This has many drawbacks. For starters you either buy in all the way or you're out - all the way. And it's one of those things that's first-come first-served, since no newbie no matter how active can argue with someone who's been there for day 1 in terms of involvement or ties to The One Story. If you happen to not like it or your character isn't the type to become invested in whatever the arc's themes are you're also screwed.
The other big issue with it, as TR found out during the EotW story is that having so many moving parts makes it a bitch to coordinate every faction to contribute their part in it. Some bolster more active Storytellers/GMs, others have fewer active players in general - and of course some fit in more than one faction ("my girlfriend is a Werewolf who's invited me over") which can either be a very organic part of character development or a special snowflake thing where someone wants their finger in every pie.
And so on... I think breaking arcs down with just some kind of distant link to them is the best way to go.
Also! They don't need to fucking dominate everything. To get back to True Blood the Big Bad of each season didn't take over every damn scene; some were about interpersonal drama, romance, drug addictions, dysfunctional families, whatever... and the villain just sort of lurked in the background. Hell, season one's bad guy was a regular human with a fucking knife, it wasn't even about a huge fight or anything.
I think that works better, for sure.
@Tempest said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:
Into the Badlands could be pretty dope. I'm pretty sure there's a crowd around who are always talking about wanting a post-apoc game. The problem is they probably want more Fallout-y?
One of the many, many, many issues that fragment our community (but also make it great in a way, take your pick) is we're so hard to please and won't compromise easily.
Sure, I want a post-apocalyptic game, but not Fallout, and no no, The Walking Dead isn't it either, I want Badlands - exactly that, nothing else will do. Or... sure, I want a DC Comics game but set in the post-Rebirth Universe not the New 52. What do you mean the Flash is Barry Allen? No no, I'm out.
It's just how we're wired. 
@tragedyjones said in Sin City Chronicles:
- Is this going to be a sandbox environment or are you thinking to focus on narrating a longer arc (or arcs) of metaplot?
For #2 - Yes, I am working on that as part of the main reason to even be doing this again.
Yes what?
@Tempest said in Sin City Chronicles:
It seems incredibly unlikely you're going to BE ABLE to put much effort into a metaplot, when your advertising post for the game is "We've got every splat you could ever want! And we're going to stay true to the theme of all of them!"
Why not wait until something fails though? I don't mean to jump down your throat here but... well, we've already seen "this can't possible ever work"... work just fine once someone put it in play.
For example someone told those Fear and Loathing guys their idea to offer high-end PCs playable out of XPs would never work and would get abused after they had already done so and it wasn't getting abused.
We're all jaded around here, it comes with the territory, but let's give some consideration at least to the vague possibility something might not fail just because it's ambitious or new?
With 6 or 7 or more splats, there is no way this ends up being anything other than another sandbox.
I'm 90% certain (I've done the math) this would come down to the implementation, not the scope. If enough work and creativity is poured into it why would it fail? There's no reason actually for these separate moving pieces to be connected; TJ never claimed they would be linked.
In fact one of the big things I agree with @surreality about is that the big game-wide central metaplot idea is probably a bad one. Seasonal smaller arcs are far more manageable, modular, and have the fundamental advantage that if you don't like the current story then well... in a couple of months it'll run its course, then you can get onto something new.
Like they do on TV shows, you know? True Blood didn't have the same villain every year.
@Botulism said in Which canon property/setting would be good for a MU* ?:
For better or worse, people end up playing what they know, not what they profess to want.
Absolutely. Or alternatively - tell me what you think of this - people sometimes will know what they want once you give it to them..
And you know, this whole thread's topic (which yeah, is a theoretical one so who cares) has a glaring problem which many game-runners who based their MU* on an existing property know - you're limiting your players to folks who've read/watched whatever the original work was.
That's a hell of an issue sometimes, since some will want to stay super loyal to the material and others won't know it enough (or at all) and just read your wiki or ask questions to figure this out.
@faraday said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
What makes it an improvement is having a better user experience. You don't have to learn a set of command-line commands and remember obscure syntax (is it bbpost title/message or title=message?). You can have images to prompt the story appear seamlessly in poses. You can use hyperlinks and bold text and other formatting things that telnet MU*s don't let you do. You don't have the game over here and the wiki over there and have to worry about integrating the two (often times manually). You don't have to clean logs. Etc. Etc. Etc.
That's exactly it. Not relying on text-only. Being able to offer a decent user interface - hell being able to provide visual, point-and-click one. We're all stuck on command-line stuff for so long but that's not what people expect; a black screen with walls of text and +command stuff is too much.
The way I like to think of it as an example is this: Imagine CGen where you see a character sheet not much unlike (or even identical) to the one at the back of the RPG book, and you fill it up in exactly the same way.
The barrier to entry would be significantly lower and I think there would be a lot less friction in many day-to-day MU* tasks. But that's just me. I freely admit to being in the minority here.
I'd like to think once the paradigm is shifted - and to do that we'll need a working prototype - things will take their course. It won't be easy for us (and I'm including myself in that list - no one gets to use a specific way to play for 20 years and then suddenly switch completely overnight without some regret) but I don't see another way for the hobby to actually start getting new players in any decent numbers. At the moment we only get those motivated enough to fight through it.
@Paris said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
And yes, so far it's been working fine. Players have been responsible about following the guidelines, and offering leadership and mentoring without stomping on folks. We've been monitoring things as well, and have only rarely needed to suggest and clarify things to Guest Stars to help keep folks on track.
I'm glad to hear it. It's good to experiment and try new things then have people prove you right for trusting them.
@faraday I started a web MU-from-scratch project back in the day for my own amusement but I got distracted. It was based on a php websockets server and I had it working with a grid stored in MySQL with rudimentary 'pages' for chat ... but then I realized how much work it'd be to write a forum and ticket system from scratch, too.
Plus, as you noticed, there's not that much interest at those stages. I figure someone will eventually bite the bullet and produce a base platform others can build on, but until then it's hard to recruit help.
@faraday That sounds pretty interesting actually. No 'eeeh' from me, it sounds like you already put a lot of work in it, and if it was ever working (including live chat - Discord is a good idea but if everything else functions it'd be great to be able to communicate in-tab as it were) I'd be definitely interested.
@faraday Perhaps? I'm at work now so I can't quite look at this, but what is it based on? Or is it home-grown? What are the features?
Oh, another thing.
Anything that keeps a PC from the grid - be it CGen or unthawing (obviously excluding restricted concepts or banned characters) - might as well be removed if it's not 100% necessary.
Soft approval, if you need it, is a better alternative than making someone wait for 1-2 days before they can show up on the grid - and even if you catch some problem after the fact so what? Fix it, but let people RP in the mean time.
Look, I know it's not in the works. And I don't want to derail the thread.
But a web-based game instead of relying on telnet has got to be the largest innovation to the form we can have here.
So, aside from our customary back-and-forths, a couple of questions for @tragedyjones :
What are you thinking to do different this time than your last project(s)? That is, what's cool about this project?
Is this going to be a sandbox environment or are you thinking to focus on narrating a longer arc (or arcs) of metaplot?
Arx. Their @randomscene take is very good; instead of giving a handout to new players' XP, they make them more desirable by basically enabling all newbies to give extra XP to those around them. Essentially every newbie is a walking nexus of RP as people flock to cash in.
It could use some tweaks - you can 'waste' your two weeks if you happen to not be very active right from the start, and people often went to newbies' scenes but didn't really do anything with them, for example - but it's still a stellar idea.
@Bobotron said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
You actually touched on something I had been dancing around bringing up in my head. Rosters of 'setting NPCs'. Not just mooks and enemies, but (to use a vampire example), the Primogen, Prince, Seneschal, etc. Things you want to be consistent. But at that point, you'd have the same 'NO FCs!!!!!' people screaming about it, despite the good it would do to be like 'here are the guidelines, here's the process to GET this PC, you cna have normal PC and custody of this, just ensure you follow policy X on 'history and updates' or whatever.
Personally my concern is never "oh, players are going to ABUSE playing a PRIMOGEN TO favor their BUDDIES". I mean if they do then step in, it's not a big deal.
I am a lot more concerned about NPCs being played consistently however; if I'm playing that 400 year old Elder like an angsty teenager today and you're playing them like a racist cranky old man the next then at some point it'll become an issue. That's the only reason I prefer granting specific players 'custody'; that, and continuity - then if I fall off the face of the earth due to RL next week the Primogen himself is still the same character, there's some continuity, and someone else can claim and use them for plots. It's not my NPC, I just... take care of them for a while.
And there should be specific guidelines and restrictions so I'm not basically just using them as my PC. Fear and Loathing's guideline about Guest Stars covered it well, I thought, even though they weren't doing this exact thing.
@Bobotron said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
@Arkandel
Re: Player STs
Yeah, but how do you break the cycle of trust that @surreality and I were talking about briefly? The players need to have some sort of buy in, and not just some tangible reward benefit.
Concessions have to be made from both sides. If you're staff and I'm a player and we both go in thinking he's out to get me then of course it won't work!
So for example I don't like the idea of PCs holding high ranks in game-wide factions; it generates drama and often unthematically high turnover ('the Prince has changed for the sixth time this year'). So what if we opened up NPC positions like that in a roster-like fashion as unchangable, static playable NPCs instead? So for example I'd be playing my Crone PC as normal but I also get 'custody' of the Invictus Primogen under certain conditions - can't use him for PvP or to favor my alt, etc.
My understanding is at least... Fear and Loathing is already doing something similar and it hasn't blown up on their faces, and it lets such characters be used for PrPs both as antagonists and quest givers. Do you know how many times I wanted to use a random Vampire NPC just to kick off a storyline by having them task PCs with something, and staff said they alone have to play such characters, so I had to basically create a new NPC out of nowhere from scratch who has no ties to the game outside of my specific arc? Why? How is the game served? Give your players a bit of leeway and let them play with your toys.
Re: PC Rivalries
What do you do to incentivize a PC rivalry so that it doesn't turn into killytime? Having rivals is great and awesome, but it seems like people have no conception of escalation and process other than 'you insulted me, I'm going to blow you up now!' This also becomes harder in a non-factionalized game, where your rivals/enemies may be within the same group as you, and doubly hard in a game where PK is fairly trivial.
Escalation is an issue. My hope is that if your PC, as my rival, is personally responsible for 60% of my XP and it's taken us six months to ramp it up there, then I really won't want to kill him in some meaningless spat - there goes my meal ticket! Coincidentally it also gives us an incentive to actually play more often - tying status to it makes sense, too. We're defined by our enemies in many ways so why not socially as well?
But of course this has to be thematic, which isn't too hard. Vampires aren't supposed to just destroy each other, there's a Tradition about this; Uratha, the same. Outside the WoD... say, Arx offers duels as a way to settle dispites, or a MU* based on something like @surreality's beloved Black Sails, a show which had a high turnover at times, could still take advantage of the realization every pirate they killed was one less abled person around to fight the Brits.
Whatever it is, I think unless your game is meant to have dead PCs as a core trope then you need to make sure it's not the go-to for conflict resolution. But there are many ways to do this.
@tragedyjones said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
Re, PC Rivalries:
Perhaps a board or wiki or something announcing people, uh, looking for rivals? Maybe even make it a semi-official thing, where as someone is designated as your OOC nemesis, and you get reward X for thwarting them, and that reward is milkable (including more RP) but if you just, idk, KILL them, the flow is cut off.
Especially for a Vampire game, having a nemesis is fun.
@Thenomain, requesting one (1) +ST command that does what Ark suggested!
Although a forum or something can absolutely work, what I was talking with @Gingerlily about a few days ago was trying to automate this stuff so that it seems organic and seemless.
For example:
Ark and TJ meet at a bar. TJ rolls manipulation on Ark; if it succeeds they both get a tiny bit of XPs on the spot, along with a cooldown for a few RL hours so they can't just spam it. It also increments the rivalry counter between them.
Next time Ark and TJ roll between them the same thing happens but the amount of XP ramps up slightly based on that counter. And then the same thing happens, again and again - until the rivalry between us is a constant, primary source of XPs (obviously there should be diminishing returns at some point, but you know where I'm going with it).
What does this shit do?
It means we actually like the rivalry. Sure, IC one of us probably wins or loses or whatever, but it's advancing us both dammit. It's not just fun for the winner - hell, you can give slightly more XPs to the loser as a sweetener.
It makes social skills relevant and wanted. You know how we rarely roll stuff on each other because it's such a sigmatised practice? Well, this makes it actually part of the game on an everyday basis.
And the best part? Other than the coders having to code this crap in, it takes 0 work from staff and 0 work from players. No +jobs need to be filed, no justifications, nada. It just works based on stuff you'd want to be doing anyway - using your sheet abilities to do what they're made to do.
@tragedyjones said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
@Arkandel The idea about possibly allowing players to alter descriptions, and of allowing them to be STs in general, is appealing to me.
Maybe even just have a policy where, in any scene of X or more players, they may designate (or just agree on a volunteer) to act as a Storyteller/GM for the scene?
Well, my reasoning here is simple: A common issue with MU* is we need to make tasks 'scale up' {tm} so staff doesn't burn out from the upkeep. To do this there are just three approaches:
Remove the tasks
Automate the tasks
Crowdsource the tasks
Since 1) can only be done too much before the game is poorer for it, and 2) can only be done with things which can be automated, the only remaining resource to tap is players, right? So let's invest in those fuckers, see if they can contribute a little.
I like the idea of designating STs - make it be an actual command ("Arkandel volunteers to ST for this scene! Are you okay with this?") and if more than half the characters are okay he gets some sort of funky set of abilities such as limited viewing of current aspirations for those present.
Another thing I'll never get tired of promoting is encouraging IC rivalries. Making characters provide each other's challenges is a good thing - it's just that we've traditionally been going the wrong way about it. If the only way I'm challenging your character results in either a win for you or loss of your character/position ("I stab you in the heart/remove you from Sheriff") then of course it comes down to negative OOC feelings, but if the very fact we're opposing each other long-termly regardless of who wins is becoming a primary source of XP and status then damn, suddenly we're not obstacles to each other... we're source of precious RP and character advancement.
@tragedyjones said in Innovations to the form (Crowdsourcing?):
- Grid Design - Part of me feels that a pre-made, pre-described grid is... a waste. Many players eschew the room descriptions, and many prefer to use +temprooms, RP rooms or private builds. How much is a minimum necessary grid design for a city? The sprawling layouts of DM or even HM are, imo, dead.
I quite agree. But then again I don't really think grids in general are necessary - hangouts are. As long as a few prexisting rooms are in place (parks, bars, hospitals, etc of different styles) and the ability to create temprooms or whatever, that's more than enough.
- An End to Bar-P - I have long ranted against random social banter RP, slice of life stuff, when that is all I can find. It is something I personally feel should be used as a downtime thing between active story
+1. Personally I hate bar RP PrPs even more, but some do like it so... mileage, I guess. The idea of a 'birthday party PrP' makes me wince though!
- Homework - Some games thrive on this, some entirely balk at the idea. But in general, how much effort is fair to ask of your players? Is background too much? Scene tracking? How can we streamline this process as well. Clearly automatic logging is not something most people, or anyone, wants.
I prefer attracting players to forcing them to do things. So while a very simple background could be required (I don't think even that should be), letting players fill out short/long term aspirations for example leads to XPs, so they have a reason to do it. Or... you could match STs to them if they fill out some 'wanted' sections on what kinds of things they want ran for them - completely voluntary but there's a payoff for it. Or they can file a weekly report - like KD did, which was a good idea - instead of automatic XP... which lets staff know what's going on on their own grid.
Such things have a payoff without being chores. If a player doesn't want them, if it's too much, so be it.
- Making things matter - How do you make what happens logical, consistent, and important without dedicating a small team to it? How do you ensure that the firefight that happens in one neighborhood actually impact the lives of the characters who live there but were not logged in at the time? How can we establish continuity of Non-Player characters between stories, characters, players, and scenes?
I think this requires the expenditure of a resource staff hasn't traditionally spent on players - trust. But for example allowing any character to change the description to any room temporarily - with an easy way to restore them to the default - could help.
Yielding some control over staff resources like sphere NPCs to players can also help; so many characters are born on a staffer's mind, get put on a wiki page and then stay there because there's never enough time to flesh them out or give the leverage they ought to have in the actual game so they can enrich PCs' RP. Allowing players to control them in a limited fashion as a hybrid between roster characters and NPCs for example might be fun.
Finally, making sure plot reaches your players in different ways and through a variety of venues is important. You know what I see a lot of? Either gigantic staff-ran scenes where a lot is on rails, or small pockets of activity centered around pocket STs where most of the MUSH has no such access to PrPs - or worse, they're limited to the aforementioned "PrP" bar scenes. To do this there has to be part of the game's design - matching STs to characters, lettering the latter give hooks to the former so they can concoct plots where they can thrive.
For instance it's really hard start an openly accessible public +event where I may know X, Y, Z are coming but hardly anything about what X Y or Z actually want; what motivates their characters, what their players would like, something. Anything. So it's common to end up with a necessarily more generic plot hoping to hit the right notes enough to engage people - but if those players are encouraged to provide this information upfront, and keep it up to date, it's a much more efficient process.
I hope that helped some.