@cirim13 said in Shadows Over Reno:
I would avoid the public events because I don't want to slow down the pace with questions and my book-flipping while things are getting exciting.
Would you say not being familiar with the mechanics is a major factor in not queuing for +events? Or to rephrase, if you knew the system inside and out would you have been?
@Auspice Oh there's no boat in my case, it was a theoretical scenario. AFAIK no one has told me to never talk to them again.
... if they did, sorry! This is even the right place for the apology. 
@Kanye-Qwest Yeah, it's a serious question. I think I'm reading your replies unless I misunderstand something - I don't want to revive the debate here though since it'd go off-topic.
My inclination is to not disallow reasonable things for good players because a bad player might take advantage of it. And I don't see the gap between that and catering to the later being that significant.
@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
and why should we cater to problem players?
@Kanye-Qwest said in Shadows Over Reno:
@Auspice What a question.
Hmm. However in that pose tracking thread we were totally catering to problem players, just in reverse, by not offering legitimate perks to perfectly good players because the bad ones would maybe abuse them.
Why isn't that exactly the same thing?
Here's something to debate since we're into that.
We've had a big argument and you told me to fuck off and never contact you again!
Then I go and post an apology thread here addressing it to whom it may concern.
Is that okay or am I being a douche?
@Miss-Demeanor I think that's a byproduct of our collective policy of copying what others have done before.
So the Hunter sphere is subject to TR's rules on hunting, and the possibly misguided notion it'd all become a cesspool of PvP in an instant otherwise.
I am not saying it wouldn't go down like that. Just that I'm not convinced staff in each game with Hunter in it had a conversation from scratch considering the angles from scratch, proposing alternatives and possibly allowing the sphere to exist without the tether; my suspicion is each generation just goes with the safe option.
@Lisse24 said in Shadows Over Reno:
@Arkandel I want to make clear that I think plot is extremely important. I just think the PRP/+event system is a terrible way to run plot.
In my experience, PRPs/+events are disconnected, isolated events that have no connection to what my character has done in the past or what my character will do in the future. There is little attempt to wrap things into the broader sphere or my character's development. Players pick them up and drop them with little care or consequence. Maybe yours are different, I dunno.
Mine aren't different than what you're describing, no, except within their own biosphere (plotsphere?); I sometimes allow one story to evolve into another, for example, so there's continuity. But when I say 'sometimes' I mean when players are engaged and follow it up, which hasn't happened in a long time for me. That is probably circumstantial though.
Can't say that I've ever been on one of mine, but the strength that MU's have over TT's is the ability to tell a long, sustained character driven story. To that end, if a +event/PRP is a nice way to spend an evening if I have absolutely nothing else to do, but I'd much rather be chewing down on some nice, meaty plot goodness.
I view PrPs as boxes; you get out of them what you put in there in the first place. So say, if my Werewolf goes into a building infested by Possessed where he has to put a bunch of them down and I treat it like a random adventure then it advances nothing; it's a story to tell over drinks, maybe. But if I allow him to feel and think about it - those were families who just got destroyed, that was someone's father he just killed and if he had been better at keeping track of these things maybe this wouldn't have happened then that's different. Next time he gets more proactive, or becomes obsessive, or starts to stalk the rest of that family to guard them (no need for a PrP for it, it's part of his routine now) and what starts as a... as almost nothing is suddenly way more.
As an actual example, on HM a Werewolf player had asked me to run an one-shot plot for him to justify a Glory spend. In it he ran into a rapey-spirit called Keep Running and destroyed it. Yay, he got his spend.
A couple of months later I ran a larger plot for the sphere where they were chasing an unknown enemy uniting spirits and actively hunting the hunters - the big bad turned out to be Keep Running who had remerged, stronger than before, and really angry. That got a rise out of that player - in a good way - who saw something he thought was a closed and shut chapter of his life come back to haunt him.
I also have a very specific opinion about pacing. In that I like things to be slow. I want to find out a little bit of info, have a week (or two!) to RP that thing to death and make decision. Then act, find out new plot info, and RP that thing out. Bonus points if the plot-RP leaves some effect on my char for the between down-time.
That's tough. I probably sound like a cranky old ST but it's rare for me to get players who're going out there doing stuff proactively for scenes although I'd very much like them to do so. For a while now I keep having to nag, tug on sleeves and page just to get answers from +jobs - or to get people to file those +jobs in the first place - but that means if I leave things be too long instead of the time being used to feed the story and build it up between sessions it grows cold instead.
@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
The other reason I don't run stuff game-wide is because... half the time I do plots on the fly.
I'll be RPing with X or Y person and just in the process of it... start throwing in some sort of mystery or a crime (if Law/Hunter types). It's off the cuff. I can't really... schedule that.
I never do that. @Ganymede has mentioned it a few times but I'm very self conscious about STing things in scenes my PC is part of. I'm old school, man.
@Misadventure I am sorry you are incredibly boring.
Oh, wrong thread?
@mietze said in The Apology Thread:
If you want an apology to be taken seriously, I suggest the following:
- Make it personal and private, if the offense was towards a person and was not a psycho hosebeast explosion publicly. Generic Sorry I Was A Butt To Some People "apologies" come across about as sincere and are about as effective as those cop out Some People Need To/Not generic gutless staff finger waggling posts on Bb1.
That's not always possible. MUSHes are transient things, if I was an asshole to Jenny@SomeGame a public apology is really all I have, especially if Jenny's player has had any reason to think I'm going to stalk her across games by revealing her other identities.
@Auspice Yeah, that kind of setup sounds a lot like what most people do on Werewolf.
I can't imagine playing that kind of game without STed scenes since... well, bar RP for me is where hopes and dreams go to die. I can survive for a while on romantic relationships and the such but there's only so much of that I can do before it turns into Shang with a thin layer of WoD on top.
I want to hear back from people who really don't care about PrPs though. I'm really being curious here since it's such a different way to play the game than I'm accustomed to.
@Auspice Speaking of which, and since I've never played Hunter on MU*, does the sphere function in the absence of PrPs?
Since a player ( @Lisse24 I think, too lazy to scroll back ) stated they weren't as important as I think, I'm curious if they are actually critical for certain spheres but just not for all of them.
Man, on MSB we can't even apologize without debating about it.
@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
I like the stories nWoD allows me to tell, but the games end up so massive that there are just so many different variations and moving pieces that it is literally impossible to run a scene that isn't going to leave someone frustrated (most often that person will be the ST).
I only ever run into it on Mage. With Mage I need to reeeeally be extra careful when I design plot revolving around puzzle solving else one player who knows their stuff can crack the whole thing in the first session.
However what you're referring to is why I try to run my own separate plots from staff's metaplot... I want to control the moving pieces as much as I can. It's already complicated enough without having to go back and forth with overworked staff trying to get permission to run the Prince or figure out if something can work the way I'd find convenient for my story, not to mention if I flake out I'm going to inconvenience the smaller number of people possible.
@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
In scenes with the former (the 'do all the things'), I end up just not... doing much of anything at all because I get tired of not even having the opportunity. There are people who just sort of need to be led by the hand, but then there's also those who give up because they realize that their poses are just going to be fluff and filler because Sue over there is jumping pose order, is complaining OOC or on channel whenever someone else does something, and the ST involved says nothing.
It's a tough issue to solve and it can't be done through mechanics. For example the ST poses your PC has discovered a body in an alley; while you're typing the pose to alert the group about it I pose sifting through its pockets.
Is that because there's ambiguity on behalf of the ST? Did they not make it sufficiently clear if everyone IC saw the body or just your PC?
Should the ST only 'pose' these things in private to the applicable players? But then there may be miscommunications by emission (when you pose to alert the other characters you OOC forget to mention there's a bullet hole in his forehead) or the ST has to pose again after the discovery, and it's running a PrP is spammy situation for them as it is.
Should mechanics handle all that using the 3-second per turn rule? If so I'll slit my wrists now because making sure everyone's doing that will drive me crazy.
Other?
I'm pretty open to suggestions!
I've tried paging the ST before in these cases. To say 'Hey, I appreciate that you're running this... But because Sue keeps jumping pose order to do everything, no one else even has a chance. I haven't even had anything to pose except reactions to her and I'm starting to flag.'
Since this is a pretty common scenario I've seen it come up a few times. The last one was awkward because the person who paged me was close to my PC and I didn't want to sound like there was a conflict of interest there. Maybe I'm being paranoid about things like that though.
Maybe we should encourage more players to be brave enough to speak up?
That'd be great, but how?
As an ST, one thing I've done to help spread the love, as it were... When I, say, ask for a Perception roll... I give everyone a different bit of information (if possible; sometimes it's not doable). That way, no matter who is posing or in what order, everyone has something to contribute. I also page them all separately... as I've had an ST page everyone who succeeded to say "OK, Auspice, you see Y and Bill, you see Z." and Bill poses seeing Y and Z.
Yeah, I do that often. The only problem is when one of your players is inattentive/inactive (spot a pattern in my pet peeves yet?) and they totally miss an important clue which might not be that easy to work back in the same scene.
Do you treat everyone that way? Hell no. But it's why 90% of what I run on nWoD is for my friends and 10% is for all comers. Because I can only handle the stress of people management on top of STing for so long.
Yeah, ditto. I seriously get the inclination to only run them for people I already know but that does not make for a healthy MU*, especially for smaller places. That's my bigger-picture concern here.
@Kanye-Qwest said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
@Arkandel OR it would turn the players into ravening fun-policers, so ready to chastise someone for daring to step outside a pose order or do All the Things that they are willing to champion it for games they don't even play!*
*Like you, I'm talking shit on you, and what you're doing right now. In case that wasn't clear.
I'm perfectly okay with you talking shit on me... if it's over something I did. Then I can defend it or admit I was wrong, both of which I'm known to do.
But I never championed stepping outside a pose order and I certainly don't support Doing All The Things.
What I did do was be okay with having a system (that someone else requested!) which keeps track of who is normally supposed to pose next so people don't need to wonder who's next or forget if it's their turn. It's just supposed to be for that, tracking... and no more mandatory than a RP seeking flag system where, if someone comes to your room, you'd somehow be obligated to play with them.
Conversely opinions and suggestions should be judged on their own merit. Let the person who never posts anything on games they don't play cast the first stone.
@Auspice said in Shadows Over Reno:
Or the person who tries to take over the entire scene and do ALL THE THINGS and call ALL THE SHOTS and if anyone else gets even an iota of attention or Thing to Do (even if they have 9 of 10 things), they start complaining OOC about being bored / left out. (Saw this one often, tho primarily from the same person, on BitN).
That one I've seen before. In fact it happens pretty regularly... and it's hard to act upon. I don't want to ruin anyone's fun by paging them ("hey man, let someone else do things too?") but I suspect they might be ruining other people's fun otherwise.
Extra points if the person doing this happens to be the only 'active' person in the PrP, and if I correct them things stall because the others aren't stepping up to fill that gap but just pose scuffing their feet and not doing much of anything... so I essentially shot my own scene in the foot.
I'll be honest... About 80% of why I'm on Reno is so I can run plots for people I know. So I can do my ST-ing without having to go through the headache of the types of people listed above (or worse: do all the legwork on a plot only to have someone bully me out of it so they can have it to themselves / their friends). I've all but given up on ever being able to enjoy myself in an 'open' PRP/plot scene on an nWoD game.
I know that feeling too! But I feel kinda guilty - especially on a small MUSH that means my buddies get to do things. The hogging issue is a lesser concern to me - the real one is if unknown people come and they're just not attentive. My nightmare is a PrP where I keep trying to throw things out there and all I get is non-committal poses every twenty minutes; as a regular player I can just bail but as the ST I'm kinda forced to stay the course until the bitter end.
@Miss-Demeanor Half this thread so far reads like a sorry-not-sorry to me.
@Roz said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
If there's a strict pose order in a big scene and people have to save all of their reactions for one pose, you end up with the giant "I have to respond to everyone" pose. I think KQ is saying that if people were more free to respond to things as they come, it would be easier and read more naturally.
Anyone playing in a large scene who resists using the 3PR is a monster and should be put down for their own good.
But conversely even with it I've seen people try to do all of the things. I've seen it happen on Arx, for that matter, explicitly. With 3PR - what, there are injured people around but there are other medics present other than myself? No matter - here's a 2-line pose about running around healing everyone.
We can't fix inconsiderate players either by having or not having a system in place. But maybe a system could help the rest of the players.
