@surreality Hm, you're right, I hadn't thought of that.
I guess that, other than the crowding issue (it's far easier to figure out a reason no-more-than-five people would be present for a party that goes down the sewers to hunt kobolds than for a family meeting) my preference is also due to the fact these kinds of social scenes can happen organically but plotted multi-part stories absolutely cannot.
@SG said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
Unfortuantely, I find myself only with the time for the 3rd, plotless scenes lately. Any time action pops up, I'll bow out because those sorts of scenes will drag on for hours with dice rolls, and people showing up to include themselves because OMG plots! Or one player wanting to include the whole gang because everyone wants to play all of a sudden. This is sad, because my favourites are slice of life scenes that turn into action scenes.
Interesting, because that's the opposite of my experience - well, kinda. I find purely social scenes tend to attract a ton of players, making them spammy and directionless (well, more so than usual). I guess in @surreality's chart of different strokes for different people, that's my kryptonite, crowds. 
Hey folks, I wanted your opinion or something.
Maybe I'm wrong about this but have you noticed a shift toward 'plotless' scenes in the last few months?
What I mean is that very generally speaking player-ran events on MU* tend to fall into certain categories:
Something with a plot. There's a ring of thieves in town and someone's hired the characters to hunt them down.
A 'slice of life' scene. Typically one-shots, they're mostly about giving characters something to react to. Characters in a 7/11 when two masked guys come in to rob the place! What do you do?!
Plot-less social scenes. Family get-togethers, beach parties, let's-plan meetings.
I seem to be seeing less of the first happening than I used to but that might just be my impression, what does it look like from where you're playing?
@surreality It could work, it's mostly technical limitations that might prove pesky.
For example, other than the dice-roller I mentioned above (which it has to be tied to your in-game stats since STs can't be expected to go check if the 9 dice you rolled were actually your strength+melee sum), you also wouldn't have notifications when someone posts something new but you'd need to keep hitting the refresh button, people would need an account per character or I'd need to remember 'surreality' is playing 'Leia', there is still no nested view for those walls of text unless you get really fancy with templating, etc.
Oh, and are there modules which would show lists of such 'discussion' pages per character? If I'm on a bunch of separate PrP threads I would want to see them all in one place, but only the ones I'm on, not every one in a big long list.
In other words there will be a point where you'll need to consider what you are gaining this way and if it's worth the tradeoff, just like any other system you're introducing. What are you hoping the benefits are?
I check Yelp out if I'm somewhere unfamiliar, like driving through a town I intend to stop for a meal. Sure, that 4.2 average rating restaurant might just be boosting its own scores but it's still a better indication than picking one at random, or just from how it looks like from the outside.
I'll always read semi-recent negative comments if there are any though. Even if they are overrated those are still there.
@surreality Yeah, I've considered the wiki for stuff like that before but it was privacy options that stopped me. Plus there's no easy way to roll into a wiki page.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
Yes, sounds like what I had in mind. Since you mention Evennia, I would likely consider the "thread" here as a type of "channel" (I presume you don't mean quite the same thing?). A channel is, the way I use the term, nothing more than a message re-distributor; you could use a channel to send a mail to multiple recipients as much as you could use it for chatting.
What I mean by 'thread' in this context is anything a group of players can look at asynchonously then add to. It should probably be write-only (if someone's being abusive we don't want them changing what they wrote before) - the idea is STs might not be online at the same time as everyone else, or some OOC research or communication with third parties might be needed, etc.
Also remember the same tool can (and should) be used for other purposes such as example timezone and schedule coordination for the next scene - so it needs to be flexible for new people to be added and old ones to drop out at will.
To continue the Evennia example above, if one didn't want to use the strict sender-recevers paradigm, one could instead use tagging, where messages are stored in a pool that is filtered by the tags set on each message. It'd be a simple thing to make a command for viewing the "job pool" based on the permissions of the players/staff and the tags/locks set on individual messages by STs. Players would have permissions to view only messages with the tag of the plot they are in and/or messages particularly tagged to them while admins would default to seeing only those particularly flagged for them to handle. Such a system sounds like it should be general enough to handle most custom cases mentioned - it's just a matter of allowing more tags to be set in combination with more ways to filter the pool.
I think what will make or break this system - which otherwise seems feature-rich enough to cover all cases I can think of at least - is the interface. Sometimes systems require arcane incantations with a ton of arguments for common things and ... well, the point was made earlier that if it's intimidating players won't use it. The basic syntax at least, reading existing visible comments by everyone else tagged and posting new ones visible to all, must be really very easy.
Finally, the fact this is over telnet itself is a limitation - a thread can get pretty long, but if it's over the web maybe we can have nested comments and sub-threads, making it far more convenient for future reference.
The telnet text limitation is something that can be worked around with OOB telnet instructions using a client aware of, say GMCP or MSDP to put such things in separate windows with custom GUI elements. Mushclient supports this as far as I know. Mudlet is another example. Easiest is of course to handle it in a web client customized for the purpose, then you as the game developer has the control over both client and server at the same time ...
As a SimpleMU user I'm naturally suspicious of protocols that require a specific client to be used but as long as it works for basic telnet as well as richer clients it should be fine. The problem here usually is the massive wall of text that comes up when you view something people have been posting and/or rolling to for a while; you can still paginate it over telnet, I guess, but that can make things worse rather than better.
@Griatch I like that escalation system - as long as the interface for the players can be non-nightmarish. It can be a simple flag, marking a particular post as needing staff intervention.
The process then would be like this?
)Assuming staff and STs are working together it's not a big shift from what we have in most MU* I've played - in those we just have a manual step between 3a and 3b where the ST makes a separate +job for staff then waits to hear back from them.
To answer your addendum though about needing a paradigm shift, the current +job system doesn't always work optimally. For example on Fallen World we ran into several issues and in the end had to get @Thenomain's intervention to help out; for instance we couldn't CC players to a job without staff doing it, then the comments we made had to be manually published else they were invisible to non-staff (which is what he fixed for us). In the end that was obviously not very optimal.
There are additional things that could be improved - there's no obvious way to flag a +job as being potentially interesting to staff for example. Or to mark them as private (maybe staff have alts, and they wouldn't want to see information that might be sensitive, both for their benefit and other players'). A common issue, too, is if one player runs an investigation and I give them the results - now there's no systemic way for me to announce them to just that player, which means they can't (for example) fake the results, or only report partially on their findings. Finally, the fact this is over telnet itself is a limitation - a thread can get pretty long, but if it's over the web maybe we can have nested comments and sub-threads, making it far more convenient for future reference.
@Auspice Speaking as someone who carried his cat on a trans-Atlantic flight before in the cabin, the cat's status was: mewling. Constantly.
12 goddamn hours she mewled at me. And other people. And in general. You'd think she'd shut up after a while but nooo.
Then she got out of the carrier, begrudgingly let the dogs sniff her to establish it's really her, went to pee and was over it.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
Regex-based auto-replies is a good idea but maybe hard to regularize. Another idea may be to have a policy of default timeouts from staff replies. If an ST escalates a request to staff and staff doesn't get back to it in due time, the timeout will auto-reply to the ST that no information was found. A more extreme policy would be an auto-reply telling the ST that they can now make up the answer on their own since staff haven't fulfilled their end by replying in a certain time ... maybe that would put more stress on staff, but it would avoid bottlenecks on that end at least.
I don't like the suggestion I'll make here but I'll do it anyway: Unless someone comes up with a brilliant idea, don't reinvent the wheel.
The reason I don't like that is we can really use a paradigm shift; just because we've been doing a thing for a long time it doesn't mean it's the best (let alone the only) way it should be done... but so far in the thread I haven't seen something that qualifies as a lightbulb moment, including of course my own takes on it. It's not so much that plot, investigations and assorted details can't be automated to some degree so queries reach the right person as that the interface for players to ensure things get filed properly will start getting increasingly more complicated - which is only a small step away from intimidating. A system people won't use is not a good system.
For example @Griatch's timeout suggestion won't work. Imagine I run that Orc invasion story and players ask to talk to the village Mayor - he's my NPC, the entire village is part of this one story, right? Then when players fire off an investigation which goes to staff and waits there while both I and the players are twiddling our thumbs, we'll end up realizing we're better off handling it ourselves without involving staff, through pages, which is the exact opposite of what a system should do. It ought to facilitate and improve, not get in the way. A system people need to circumvent is not a good system.
Etcetera etcetera.
Quality control is important, I don't want to belittle the matter. I used to get annoyed on TR when people ran the most inane things, right down to that now-infamous UFO landing in the middle of Aleswich. I just don't think the trade-off is worth it - not unless the paradigm does shift as described above because one of us (maybe in this thread ) comes up with something brilliant and innovative. If you guys got something, please don't listen to oldbies bitch about these things, just go ahead and suggest new approaches.
@Thenomain said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
This code belongs to @Cobaltasaurus, from start to finish. Her concept, her code, her updates. I've added comments and suggestions and when she disappeared for RL I've done some bug-fixing and Thenoisms, but events code is Cobalt's contribution to the hobby.
Just to make it clear if it wasn't, no slight was intended for Cobalt. There's no convenient way to know who's coded or had a hand in what - but it's appreciated no less.
I don't know if it can get much stupider than this.
@Thenomain It's true that sometimes I beat a point to the ground even after I've made it. I'll shut up about this one now unless there's something new to add.
@Thenomain Oh there are many ways to do it, I'm not questioning that. Sure, the map is perfectly plausible.
What I am questioning is how it enhances roleplay. It doesn't seem that more, well, immersive to me to speed-walk from A to B than to accept a +meetme request... what's the improvement on roleplay?
@Kanye-Qwest it's true but theme consistency isn't something you can codify, it's too fluid and subjective a matter. You can try to exert ever greater amounts of control over it, yes, but then you risk micromanaging your players.
What does work is establishing good communication and trust both ways; for instance a new, untried Storyteller might be handed small and self contained pieces of the puzzle, such handling a ring of thieves in the suburbs of a large city but someone staff feels more comfortable with could be handed more critical parts of the metaplot to run. Similarly Storytellers could allow themselves to be more micromanaged than the average player by submitting a general outline ahead of time (or adhering to preexisting templates with common sense guidelines such as "you can't blow up the capital") and having to go into more detail as their plots begin to affect a larger portion of the game.
It's really not very tricky. What's far trickier is finding Storytellers in the first place. People promise to do it all the time and flake out, but that's yet another thing code can't solve.
@Apos said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
Now as @Arkandel started discussing +jobs I realized this wouldn't really cover the different use cases for players (without staff permissions) running plots, for a lot of reasons. There's so much staff-only information in there that I don't know if I could make lock type permissions robust enough that would really cover all the cases of a player not seeing something they shouldn't by accident if we would give players access to it. So instead I'd have to be able to bump things down to a player running stories, and probably create something more like what he's familiar with, with a staffer looking at an investigation and going, 'Oh yeah this is for @Arkandel's plot, sending it down to him' and creating a thread for it that could still have dice rolls and automated results in it.
Although I like where it's coming from you need to be careful; a system like that scales poorly - there is a limited number of staff and a far less limited number of open plot lines stacking up on top of the day-to-day maintenance overhead that comes with running an active game. If the workload spikes a bit or, heavens forbid, staff get more on their plate in real life or are burning out or any of these very common things then it's easy for them to become a bottleneck.
The advantage of an entirely player-managed system is that it takes all that out of the equation.
@Sunny At least in Ontario there are many policies which are make invalid by, y'know, actual laws. So whereas a place might have 'no pets' as a condition doesn't matter, because after you move in you can bring your dog and they can't do jack about it.
The only catch is that if you state in advance you intend to do so they'll just not lease to you for undisclosed reasons.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
And the event code is henceforth only available to the ST I take it, as a reference as to who signed up.
Nope, everyone! There's no need to hide these things (although I guess it could be a possibility if a ST wanted to use it as a coordination tool for specific people, to avoid spamming everyone else). But otherwise you can see who else has signed up for +event 3, since maybe you don't like big scenes or you do like Jim who also signed up, etc.
I see, so this moves the game from (semi-) real time on-grid to a more abstract GM-Player like thing. Potentially Play-by-post almost, since it can be managed without ST and player being online at the same time.
Well, the scenes happen in real time as usual. But some things don't warrant scenes, they're mostly back-and-forth exchanges - characters make rolls, the ST gives back information, etc. There's no reason everyone needs to be online at the same time for it. If all you need is to ask the Mayor one quick question it's a waste to wait for a couple of days for both you and the ST to be online and available at the same time, too.
Aha, so from the perspective of a server coder, allowing the creation of rooms with such limited features is then quite trivial to offer technically.
The concept of colliding time frames appear in more MUD-style games too, although there there is seldom a possibility to simply make a separate instance of a location and people tend to just awkwardly RP around the fact that people are still RP:ing their evening visit to the bar while the sun rises on the next day in code.
There's not even the need to care if the room already exists or not. Just make the description editable and all's good - STs can just paste it from the existing one if needed. Hell, often enough STs don't even @desc the room, it's literally just a container for the scene's characters to be in, and any descriptions take place through posing (since the scene might start at a bar, become a car chase and end up in the sewers for the big fight).
Oh, I see, you are talking about one person rolling on behalf of the whole group. That makes more sense. I first thought you meant you were rolling "for them" in a more code-mechanical way.
No, although that's also a possibility. Ah, and ideally we shouldn't need to see the exact dice rolls, only the outcome; for instance if you're running Empathy we shouldn't get to see that's 9 dice as it reveals OOC how big your Empathy pool is. We should just see you rolled <X> successes.
@Griatch said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
I see, this sounds like a reasonable way to advertise what's coming. How is this maintained efficiently across multiple sessions, is there normally some coded reference of who signed up to a given "plot event" or is this something the ST needs to keep track of manually?
The code used in most nWoD MU* these days (it could be @Thenomain's, I'm not sure) works really well.
Basically the Storyteller does something like +event/create Orcs attack!=<Synopsis>/<datetime> which gives it an id, announces it game-wide and adds it to a list players can review with +events. So if it's #3, they can then sign up for it with "+event/signup 3. Once the date is past it's taken off the list.
A fully player-ran +job system is a must. Typically running plot isn't merely a matter of scenes but communicating past them; if we have to involve staff that increases administrative overhead and introduces delays. A common use for it is investigations - the characters survived the dungeon, now they want to see who's behind all this by asking their contacts, making rolls, etc... it's very handy to have all that in a single thread instead of having to shuffle through individual @mails.
What is the mechanics behind a +job? You make a post only the ST can see specifying the tools/skills/etc they want to use, and the ST then eventually gets back to you with a result? To get a feel for it, is this more structured than, say, a message board with private sections?
Again explaining it through actual use, but a +job in this context is essentially a single thread into which anyone tagged can post messages and send rolls into.
In this case I as the Storyteller would first start the thread by giving it a title ("Orc attack investigation") and an initial text ("Hey guys, this is for your investigating needs, tell me what you'll be doing"). Then I CCing my group's characters into it and they can start posting things in there ("Alright, so I'll contact the Mayor and ask if the Orcs ever troubled the village before"), etc - stuff that wouldn't necessarily be good enough to run an entire scene for. If needed I can ask players to make rolls into the +job ("roll empathy to see if the Mayor is lying").
It's important for this to be something players can do on their own without having to bug staff about it, including to close or leave the +job if it no longer applies to them.
A "temporary room" meaning that you can create and describe a locale for your plot on a whim? To what extent do you expect to be able to perform coded operations on your room? That is, do you expect players to move between multiple such room or is this mainly a way to sequester players away from the main grid?
Only that a room exists and that a custom description can be applied to it is needed. If +places can be used that's great but even that isn't too necessary - I've never had to create a multi-room temporary environment before, it's just too much effort for something that's never going to be used again.
Sometimes they can even be places that already exist on the grid, but which you want to run as a 'snapshot'; say, there may be a museum already on the grid I want to have the PCs break into and try to steal a cursed artifact at 3 am, but I don't want to take over the actual thing because what if someone walks in or is already playing there and it's noon for them?
I've read the thread and discussion on this but from the outside I've not fully discerned what +meetme does. My guess is that it invites someone else to teleport to your location, is that the correct description?
Basically, yes. +meetme Griatch sends you a message that Arkandel wants to bring you to their location, do you wanna go?
Combat-assisting aides can be invaluable. As a ST I use a text editor for table-top RPG systems but it can get pretty messy to communicate everything on demand- what's the initiative order again? How much damage has Orc #3 taken so far? And if there's a coded system (such as Arx's) then I'd need a way to spawn and control NPCs.
What kind of aides would this be? Like a command to show a critical hit table or more like commands to actually do particular rolls for you in a given system?
If I'm having 3 Orcs attack the 4 PCs then a way to set their init order (it doesn't need to be automated, it's enough if I can set Orc #1's to be 4, Orc #2's to be 6, etc after I manually roll for them. If I can also set the damage each PC and NPC has taken - and everyone present can view these things - then that's pretty good, as opposed to constantly trying to figure out the init order, etc.
All sorts of rolling options. Show a roll to just one person, ask a person to roll for specific people, rolling into +jobs.
This sounds interesting, I can think of a few different ways to roll, based on the way it can be done by a tabletop GM. What is the purpose of being able to ask a person to roll for specific people though? Because the ST doesn't know the character sheet of them?
Avoiding spam, and because you might not even want everyone to see there is a roll. Say, I rolled secretly to see if anyone might suspect there a trap in the room and only one has, so I ask them to roll awareness to me only; that way the rest of the group doesn't OOC know there is something sketchy to be aware of.
@Ghost Yeah, that's why it bugs me when people talk about numbers not mattering - sure they do. Numbers matter a very great deal.
Having great theme and a fantastic wiki means nothing if there are 3 people online, all staff alts.