Posts made by Arkandel

@Groth I quite agree.

@ThatGuyThere said:

@Arkandel
There is a world of difference between a game saying that death can and will happen, that is a good start the game as made a statement. Now it comes to the staff on the game to enforce that statement.

How do you enforce a statement which claims something may happen? I just imagined staff paging STs going "hey dude, come how no one's died in your plots in THREE WEEKS, huh?"

Elaborate if you will?

@Ghost said:

By all means, don't police rape scenes and allow characters to forcibly rape other characters on a no-consent, yes-first game and see what happens.

If you're liberally not governing what kind of things can be done on the game, then (just as an example) you are potentially allowing a player who has real life rape trauma to come into contact with a player who has unrequested physically dominating rape fantasies, and that...will be a fucking mess.

The entire point of treating players like adults and giving them the tools to play their own game is that they also have the responsibilities of adulthood. You can't have it both ways except for this one exception: if a player steps out of bounds OOC and stalks another, or doesn't take no for an answer, or won't accept the IC consequences of his actions, or tries to deny the right to fade-to-black ... etc... then it's absolutely staff's business to step in because those are things IC actions alone can't address.

Purely IC actions in this context are to be handled handled on the grid by characters in whatever way they deem fit. Capture and castrate him if you want, beat him up or kill him. Implicate him for the in-game crime of rape, call the cops and send the character to jail. Or if he's an IC creep but hasn't actually acted on it ostracise him, exclude him, vote him down until he's kicked from organizations, implicate him. Deal with it, what's stopping you?

I am not saying you are wrong - or right. Only that staff 'policing' scenes is no part of a game like this and if it's what a player expects from their staff then there are certainly more than enough MU* out there ran in a way which (claim to) offer it.

@Roz said:

Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.

Even factoring in the first six words of the line you quoted? If so, please elaborate.

I just mean that if your point is that you're not banning any IC actions of that nature, it's because you're not banning anything, not because there's no difference between the two and no reason to consider them differently. That's all I mean. I'm being obnoxiously derailing.

Please, nit-pick all you can! I'd like to have holes poked into my pitch, that's the whole point of it.

I don't want to give the impression though that we'd not be banning any IC things. That's what that 'thematic' part of the very first goal is about; some things can't exist and shouldn't. Not having to police everything else spares staff a lot of the burden in CGen and, hopefully, makes it more significant when they do feel forced to step in so it sends a message. If my concept finally forced them to wag a finger at it... whelp, I must have really fucked up, you know?

On a personal note I simply don't like rating horrible acts. Rape is a heinous thing to do to another human being, it's a crime, it's wrong. But so is murder. So is torture. I don't believe it's in the purview of running a game to determine 'which is worse' - they are all nasty. That doesn't mean other people couldn't decide for whatever reason one is worse than others and ban it from their setting, though.

@Groth said:

In a world where you have countless of competent people volunteering to staff, anything is possible. The reality of the situation is that you usually have very few staff who are very overworked because most people just want to play and many who want to help with staffing shouldn't be allowed near a staff position.

Yeah, what he said. Most games wish they had a problem of having to rotate their STs to give even more a chance at the helm. More commonly they are all-but-begging STs to step up and please run something, anything.

Hmm. I wouldn't want anything timed, no. It seems to go too far in my opinion - unless you're making a MUD, that is. There's too much potential for something to go wrong - RL distractions, lag, disconnects, etc.

Staff shouldn't need to be involved in combat anyway except for contested situations ("that's how power <A>" works!" "no it's not!") but I don't see any way to automate and rid staff from that headache without causing more issues than you're solving.

Human intervention will probably be required here - unless someone in the forum has any brilliant ideas better than what we've been doing, which is page an admin to come over and resolve whatever it is. You can try to officially preempty a lot of mechanical conflicts on the wiki but obviously that can only do so much.

Chewie and Kylo. Right in the goddamn feels.

@Roz said:

In the context of this thread it's not staff's job to say what's ethical and what's not. Is rape wrong and illegal? Yes! So is murder. If you don't intend to ban assassins from a game why draw the line at one but not the other?

Not actually arguing against your non-ban, but I think there are pretty NUMEROUS REASONS why people draw the line at one and not the other.

Even factoring in the first six words of the line you quoted? If so, please elaborate.

@ThatGuyThere said:

To me the issue is games not being clear on what they are. To use table top as an imperfect example, in most of my games I states right away in the beginning that death can and will happen, a friend of mine in the same group when he runs is clear that only in the most unusual of circumstances will a PC die.

The problem is I've never been to a WoD game which didn't claim 'death can and will happen'. How people responded to the actual possibility of death though was amusing - on TR I used to rate the risk for my PrPs in advance. I got a page by ... someone, I forget his name now (of course) who was actually one of the big guns in Mage asking me what one star meant. When I explained it meant some danger was present if things went a specific way and there was combat he immediately signed out of the +event.

Some people don't want to lose their characters. It doesn't matter what you say, what the game's rules are or even if they will be just sad but not cause issues if it happens or if they'd pitch a fit. They don't want it to happen.

There is one problem here which is systemic though; rewarding only physical danger with tangible rewards (such as XP). In the long run that means if I join every combat plot with my brawlin' Gangrel and kick ass I'll outpace your delicate socialite Daeva, especially since if you come to those scenes your chances of dying are probably significantly than mine.

Some games, like TR, compound the imbalance by letting STs get a scaling portion of the rewards and thus ensure there will be more combat scenes ran as well.

By Grabthar's hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged... but I don't know who we are going after for this.

Ghost said:

Constructive Devil's Advocacy:

So does this mean that if I really want to play a serial rapist with an immunity to jail time who uses his powers to justify uncomfortable sexual situations, that I can drag all of my Shang friends with me?

Yes.

In the context of this thread it's not staff's job to say what's ethical and what's not. Is rape wrong and illegal? Yes! So is murder. If you don't intend to ban assassins from a game why draw the line at one but not the other?

Players have all the tools to deal with and isolate, bring IC consequences or anything else to these people. The game isn't consent-based by definition. Law enforcement PCs can imprison them, badasses can beat them up or kill them. The tools are there.

Can we play a cadre of Furry BDSM experts who don't partake in plot due to what we, OOCly, really want out of the game is to have a new theme space where we can work our kink into roleplay on a new server?

As long as people don't play things which are impossible in the setting and they just go to a room and... do... things to each other, more power to them. Staff would need to come in if someone's doing something entirely unthematic (as in, can't happen) such as playing Jedi in a nWoD universe and moving things telekinetically with the Force. But at that point we're really nit-picking possibilities.

Look, assholes will happen. Staff has a widely defined range of authority to deal with them not merely even but especially in a game like this to step in and make them go away. "Yes-first" applies to IC actions within the broadly defined theme, it's after all part of the very first 'goal' mentioned.

@Apos said:

@Arkandel I think there's a few different ways to handle the idle clog, and it depends on how code heavy you want to be really and where you want the balance to fall in allowing new players to shake up the order versus preserving the old.

There are two considerations here.

1. If you can afford to code it, IMHO, it's a fantastic investment. An enormous amount of drama is generated by rank related mishaps, so giving players the power to handle their own shit removes that burden from staff's hand and places it squarely where it truly belongs. Then staff only (?) need make sure things don't get out of hand OOC - in terms of channel rudeness, page threats, etc.

2. @Coin pointed elsewhere - and he's kinda right FOR ONCE - that people vote for OOC reasons anyway. I.e. when you vote Bob for president it's not based only on whether he is a good roleplayer but also if he's sane, active OOC, etc.

In that case weighed votes are either still a good thing or not, depending on how the status is interpreted. If the vote is (at least partially) OOC then logic would suggest it should be 1:1 since 'status' belongs to the character, it's an IC thing. But on the other hand if status includes sanity considerations, and thus is partially based on the player as well to begin with, then the idea of letting it weigh in isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Thoughts?

I would lean away from hard activity requirements as such, since they feel punitive and are a big turnoff for something as casual as a game and would be contrary to your yes-first philosophy. I would try to look more at incentives for activity for any leadership figure, particularly when they are interacting with players outside of their circle of friends.

My hope is that once power over inclusion is given entirely to players and they can manage their own affairs a lot more efficiently than we've often seen so far they will be able to value leadership figures on their own and replace them without need for external guidance. After all if your leader is in absentia and you are active... vote him down and replace him, why is that a problem? Now if he's sort of active but just logs on to resist such motions then it's an entirely different ball game.

@Apos said:

I love this a lot, but I think the biggest problems will be in auditing to keep consistency and making sure all staff is on the same page, though I'm sure you know this.

Absolutely. You'll notice the entire game is geared toward not only having a small staff bur protecting them as well. Both parts are really important.

If staff is large forget about having them all on the same page; politics will rear their head, communication becomes yet another tough task to be handled rather than a given and of course you have to make (more) compromises in recruitment.

If staff is small but you don't protect them via automation, approving spends, judging backgrounds in CGen, having to decide on character ranks and parenting players then they will burn out. The pie has to be smaller (and more delicious) if you have fewer people onboard.

• ( 3, 6, 8 ) Characters decide their own groups' composition. Status-weighted votes determine ranks, positions and membership. To facilitate early game launches NPCs are set in place who can be voted out or competed with as normal by PCs. Conversely that means there are no protections for IC actions; highly ranked characters are bigger targets who may be eliminated in the same way as NPCs. Staff only audits this process to ensure OOC behavior remains civil and, to the extent it is possible for them to establish, that no OOC means or information were employed.

Good, and my preferred method, but you must make sure the means of removal of the barely active are very accessible to players. I'd say players that get a title/position/whatever and then idle out and stifle all RP around them are more common than the players that are big contributors to activity in a game. If you don't have good means of players doing this themselves, you could be dragged into endless GM'd pvp arbitration that leaves everyone unhappy.

That's a good point. Do you have a mechanism in mind for pruning the trees in organizations like that? It would need to have at least some safeguards versus clique takeovers ("me and my five buddies who created yesterday have decided y'all are in the way, so bye-bye") but allow for inactive people to not form glass ceilings.

Extremely good, but to be frank I think most MU admins are way too soft a touch and not even close to ruthless enough to really do this. You see posts about giving people MONTHS of second chances for a wildly disruptive player. You absolutely will not have time to run things if you administrate like that. If someone is disruptive, you need to show them the door immediately. No second choices, no long debates. Nothing. They have to just be gone and that's that and deal with the angry threads here calling you hitler. I believe you can't get away with any less and reasonably run the game.

Again, having a small staff helps there because you can assume you have the others' backing. Remember, this is a yes-first game for IC things; you trust your players to play. That doesn't limit your authority as an administrator to remove problematic players - indeed in some ways it increases it because you don't have to squander your players' good will by giving them unnecessary "you can't do that"'s over and over again; after all the weird shit you allow in the name of creativity when you do step in it means something.

... Or that's the theory, anyway.

Very sandbox-y, I think you might be underestimating the amount of disruptive concepts you have to deal with. Also the whole 'check to make sure if they are thematic' might have a really wide interpretation among staff which will lead to a lot of debates, and can be around something like, 'Is a troll playing a graphically sexualized character that some players find offensive worth removing or not'. Either answer will probably have some players leaving, and is a stark reminder you really can't please everyone. I'd decide early on which you want to keep rather than have a constant unhappy attrition there.

What I was thinking of in terms of 'being thematic' is stuff you could find on the wiki in a FAQ. Nothing subjective. In other words your example would have absolutely been fine - it's not staff's job (in the context of a yes-first game) to step in there, but they would if someone rolled a Jedi in a WoD MU*. Or tried to be a former <X> who is now <Y> (an Awakened Mage who is now Kindred). In other words all I'd be expecting them to catch is the really out-there shit, not variations of character concepts based on taste.

Your players will have the tools to isolate and ignore anyone who disrupt their sessions, it's the responsibility which comes with the power you bestow them. Trust them. And hope it's returned.

Very good but again I'd be ready for a lot of casually thematic breaks. This is not so bad if you want to have a sandbox, which is fine, but there will be a whole lot of descriptions which are inherently contradictory to other things and describe impossibilities. Imo I'd write a desc guide that specifically informs players of good practices, so you don't have multiple people trying to describe their location as the best X, the only X, whatever.

Even if that happens (which I don't expect to too much) it's an acceptable compromise. I mean sure, yes, someone might write up a bad as being 'the only one in town' but what does that really, truly hurt? If it's not it's not, players can still figure out where other watering holes are. The flipside of it - not needing staff to have to set it up, check up on it, players to read long guides and have to figure out even more arcane commands - is well worth the tradeoff, IMHO.

To be honest the building part to me are more of an example for something we can chop off which has been a staple of MU*ing forever rather than anything important. It's not. But if we're to examine our practices we should look at things like this and wonder if they're really worth it. The least 'work' a game includes the more benefits we yield from it - and in this specific case, we can still leave it to players who like setting this stuff up to do so. I'm not proposing we remove the commands themselves, just to not require them all to be set. Just... let go. It'll be okay. You know what I mean?

Hey folks,

Some folks lately have argued we are settling into groupthink around here and they may have a point. That we have been doing something a certain way doesn't mean it's the only way it can work. So this is something I'm working on and I can use help with - namely, I am after criticism, ideas, brainstorming and fresh approaches.

My only request is this: Be as brutal as you need to be with the implementation but let's not waste time debating the core goals; those are axiomatic, a given. It's what I want a game to be.

In other words I'd like y'all to shoot as many holes as you like into the proposed means for this game to achieve its goals, but not those goals themselves.

The Goals:

1. Create a liberal, yes-first roleplaying game. If we say no it's for a really good, thematic reason.
2. Focus on gameplay first, remove all possible obstacles and bottlenecks between players and scenes.
3. In the IC setting roleplay and players decide as much as possible. Staff decides as little as possible.
4. Automate anything that can be reasonably automated. Job monkeys should be needed as little as possible, eliminate all needless overhead for both players and staff.
5. Audit, do not approve. If possible including CGen in that. Do not pre-empty checks, trust players.
6. Offer incentives to excel, allow casual players to keep up.
7. Limit the impact of character death, encourage new character ideas.
8. Coopt the game to its players so they will have a reason to invest creatively in its course. Allow them to have a lasting impact.

So, my means and methods. The numbers in parenthesis are there to designate which idea is aimed at which goal:

• ( 3, 4, 5 ) Being staff is a role, not a privilege. All staff must contribute and their number should be small. Since the importance of handling +jobs is minimized the main duty is handling interpersonal issues, auditing potential cases of system abuse, but mainly running and coordinating running plot. Staff never decides on character positions or non-mechanical eligibility for ability or power purchases.

• ( 3, 6, 8 ) Characters decide their own groups' composition. Status-weighted votes determine ranks, positions and membership. To facilitate early game launches NPCs are set in place who can be voted out or competed with as normal by PCs. Conversely that means there are no protections for IC actions; highly ranked characters are bigger targets who may be eliminated in the same way as NPCs. Staff only audits this process to ensure OOC behavior remains civil and, to the extent it is possible for them to establish, that no OOC means or information were employed.

• ( 2, 3, 8 ) Plot is the game's lifeblood. The game comes with its own metaplot which is written to be modular and altered by characters. Staff's primary concern is to coordinate players and either run plots contributing to the overall story themselves or support players in running their own. This takes precedence over all other staff concerns save ones which make the game actually unplayable, staff should never feel they can't run an event because they're busy dealing with a troublesome player. Move the distraction in whatever manner is most appropriate and run the event.

• ( 3, 6 ) There are no feature characters, restricted features or application-only concepts. Anything up for grabs is available to all players. Characters are elevated based on the merit of their own ability to roleplay.

• ( 1, 2, 4 ) CGen has no non-automated approval conditions and there are no 'special' cases; roll what you will. It will check if you have a description and that your numbers check out, then you're on your way. If (due to code limitations) staff has to set things by hand it can happen after characters hit the grid with the understanding you can't use any missing attributes or resources in the meantime, in order to prevent mistakes or misunderstandings about mechanics ('oh, sorry, I thought I could buy Sleepwalker merits as a ghoul' -- which would be an example of one of the 'good, thematic reasons' to say no, as described above).

• ( 4, 6, 7 ) All automated XP are handed on a weekly basis to characters who were in at least two scenes (detected automagically by the code) in that period. Characters also receive a smaller portion of their XP based on incentives - Beats, PrPs ran, etc. Beats are earned on request, audited after the fact if needed to prevent abuse, up to a modest cap per week. New characters receive more automatic XP than older ones until that portion of their XP is equal, although incentive-based XP remain on the characters who earned them without catching up mechanisms. On character death or permanent retirement the majority of all their XP may be transfered to a new PC.

• ( 4, 6, 7 ) There is no justification requirement for any XP expenditure. If you have the XP you can purchase anything you wish that's mechanically available to your PC. There are time delays to preserve a believable progression in raising skills, attributes and abilities. However justifications are still optional and, on staff's discretion and subject to incentive-based caps, may be rewarded Beats by staff.

• ( 4, 5 ) Cut down on building delays; in most MU* this is time consuming, requiring checks on behalf of staff, setting exit/entrance messages, etc. It's cool to see 'Bob gets in from the street' but it doesn't provide enough to the game - "Bob has arrived" is sufficient if it cuts down on time. Let players make their own rooms on the grid, even businesses, and simply have a periodic auditing process to make sure they comply with writing regulations (tabs, linefeeds between paragraphs) so the game maintains a consistent style.

This ought to do for the time being. I've other ideas, including some level-of-consent based schemas and consideration for power disparities across different character type tiers (thanks @Misadventure) but those probably fall outside the scope of this particular thread and can wait to be introduced later depending on how this goes.

So... the floor is yours, kids.

The Aeronat's Windlass is pretty good read! Very different than The Dresden Files, also written by Jim Butcher, but well written with fun characters and an original world.

You'll enjoy it way more if you like cats (I'm looking at you, @Cobaltasaurus) since there are some cool felines in there.

@Ghost said:

Characters need to fucking die. One thing that always gets to me is the suspension of disbelief that comes from the fact that a LARGE number of mushers are willing to play actiony characters...so long as they get to decide whether or not they die, and if the risk of chardeath is up for grabs, they tend to just not get involved.

While that's true, I don't think it's unusual. What about literature or pop culture prepares us for regular character deaths? Because most people (and I don't mean that in a demeaning way) roll PCs as protagonists in their own stories. And protagonists dying is rare; so much so that shows which kills theirs become known for it - look at Game of Thrones, for some it's its main characteristic. And let's not go into movies - John McLane survives things which would have reasonably murdered anyone several times over - or books.

That's the paradigm we're all accustomed to.

Because that's what fucking gaming is.

Is it? Again, I'm not so sure. I mean sure, my character on WoW has died hundreds of times but he always gets better afterwards! It's fairly rare for gaming deaths to be permanent - Diablo's hardcore mode comes to mind but that's hardly a common feature.

@Cirno said:

... They are crappy movies, agreed, but that's a whole different story.

Why does he get to make crappy movies when Tommy Wiseau doesn't?

I'm not sure what you're asking. Isn't it obvious that if your product consistently turns out a tidy profit someone will hire you to make more of whatever it is?

@Coin said:

It's not the wait, it's that the wait is worthless. At least in @Arkandel's case, his wait finalizes in a short pose he can read in a few seconds. If I have to read two paragraphs of nothing of note, then it's considerably more annoying.

If your partner just isn't very good at roleplaying - which in this context is more about interacting and collaborating with those around them than merely writing skillfully - then it's going to happen anyway. Short pose or long, if they give you nothing to work with then that's a frustration completely independent from their prose's length.

I think (but you can correct me if you disagree) these are two correlated but somewhat separate skills - that is, writing and roleplaying.

Now, I've been on the receiving end of bad roleplaying either way. I've seen poses which ... well, the best way I can describe them is they read like a thesaurus threw up all over them, filled with lines and lines of synonyms to describe the exact same thing without adding to the scene's atmosphere, embelishing on its mood or trying to invoke an emotional response from me. That's a given, I'm not going to defend that. And obviously I've seen poses which sounded precisely like what they were; a few hastily put words after a few minutes when the other player was done doing whatever else in another window and/or real life.

The difference here is effort. Is it frustrating to play with someone who can't give me something to latch onto and build some chemistry with them? Yup. But at the very least I can tell they tried - it may be narcististic and self-indulging but they showed up for the scene. It's not ideal, mind you, but it's something.

Finally, almost nothing (*) excuses regular 10-15 minutes between posing. If the scene's tempo is that slow I lose interest fast. Sure, some players are awesome enough that their eventual response makes my jaw drop a bit and then... damn... take as long as you need to! But those aren't exactly common.

(*) Just to be sure to put this here... if you tell me in advance you're busy or will be slow for any reason so I have the option of staying or going (or just skipping you) then there are no issues at all. Take as long as you have to.

@Thenomain said:

Or at least his career.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?view=Director&id=shyamalan.htm

His movies are turning out $154 million on average adjusted after inflation. His career is fine, which is why he keeps getting to make more movies.

... They are crappy movies, agreed, but that's a whole different story.

@Coin As do I.

At the risk of repeating myself though, the point here isn't that it's possible to do as much with less, but that while it's far from uncommon to see smaller poses rather obviously come in the name of convenience, with less effort or focus put into them.

I can't expect brilliance from all my fellow roleplayers, that'd be unrealistic and unfair. Just that - well, spend a little time on this thing, don't be doing six things at once out of which one is the scene I'm putting my own time into. So even though not all long poses are excellent - that's fine - at the very least they often show the other player tried.