Posts made by Arkandel

Look, there'll always be some people who take things happening to their PCs personally. It's natural in many ways - we get attached to characters, plus nearly all non-MU* games gauge 'success' based on how well your character is doing, right? It's an easy paradigm to adopt.

The question is whether the community is able and willing to not see consequences as defeat and the first step to do that is to have a range of the former. In many MU* so far the impression is given that making the unconventional choice could result in your character being taken from you, and it is very hard to take 'okay, now I have to roll a new alt' as something positive - I can spin it any way I want but if your character gets tele-nuked as the result of RP you won't have much fun with it.

So it's where it starts, with a page or a job working such things out. "Hey, so now that mouthed off to that Pure and publicly humiliated him he'll come back and try to hurt people you care about - got any targets?" gives something to play about. It doesn't close RP venues, it opens them. Sure, your character is now marked but you can do something with it. The objective at that point for both the ST and player is to generate something fun, not flex some sort of ego-muscle.

That games which reward XP automatically and allow alts encourage the creation of sleeper PCs who sit there and soak up XP? It's a known tactic. There were people on TR who had been doing that for ages, just in case they felt like playing a Vampire or whatever, so the character would be ready to go the moment they wished it.

It's not a bad thing. Or a good thing. It's just a thing.

@Trundlebot said:

To actually feel free to take different actions in a metaplot, I have to both feel a) That these actions will be okay with staff and will not run the risk of OOC conflict or basically vindictive IC punishment of some kind. b ) That these actions will not muck up the plot for everyone else in some way or ruin existing plans etc..

You're overthinking it. For starters (and this is a usual disclaimer) if you don't trust staff to be mature enough to handle players who make different choices than they had in mind for them and would retaliate in some way - rather than making things more interesting for your PC because of the fallout of such actions - then that's the least of your worries while on their game.

But more specifically no, no. I don't think of whether playing my character will 'much up the plot'. Or if they actions will cause some sort of OOC conflict because someone else wanted a different outcome. I mean communication is really important and I wouldn't be that asshole who comes in and just plays the Fishmalk who ruins immersion by trying to get a deathgrip on the spotlight, but otherwise if there are organic choices within the plot I'm offered, I'll make the one which makes sense.

The flip-side of that is accepting consequences. When my guy kills the revered old wolf or flips a finger at the ancient Gangrel Elder who came to warn the PCs or... whatever then I can't complain if such actions carry stigma or controversy - or rather I'd welcome either.

It all, always and forever, comes down to both the ST and players having faith in each other that they're all working toward telling an interesting tale and having fun. If that trust is there things will eventually work out (the ST will give a chance for outcast characters to come back from this, the players won't be whiny bitches when something doesn't happen their way because they want to win dammit, etc), and if it's not... well, then that is what has to be fixed first. Because nothing else will really work until it's there.

But does she have a boyfriend?

Also that's the same answer as any other "why isn't <other, more powerful hero> dealing with <crisis another hero is struggling with>?". Why isn't the Flash defeating all of Oliver's enemies in the five minutes it'd take from his busy schedule to do so? Why isn't Iron Man smashing through SHIELD's super-powered enemies?

Suspension of disbelief is called for. They are busy with their own stuff, etc.

@Coin: Deadpool stuff.

I find myself really enjoying Agents of S.H....fuck it, SHIELD lately. The writing is excellent, both the dialogue and character development are pretty much spot on.

Flash is always great, especially if you're into the DCU since they're having a blast referencing anything from recreated classic covers (The Flash of Two Worlds) to obscure third-rate villains. Even the costumes sort-of work - I chuckled a bit at Jay Garrick's goofy helmet but it has its charm, oddly enough.

@Ganymede said:

@Arkandel said:

I suspect I'm not easy to storytell for on table-top after having spent too long in forums like this or playing MU*.

It could just be that you're a real dick around other people. Ever thought of that?

People love me! I'm the cat's meow. Ask anyone.

I suspect I'm not easy to storytell for on table-top after having spent too long in forums like this or playing MU*. Y'know, there are some very knowledgable nerds out there but most people haven't spent as much time as the average MUSHer nitpicking on every tiny aspect of the mechanics or finding inconsistencies - stuff which may actually be important (... "important") on online games but which are utterly without meaning when you're all sitting around a table.

So I notice things like power imbalances - who cares! - or plot holes ('why are there orcs in the middle of the abandoned dungeon you said no one has visited for hundreds of years? What do they eat?') instead of just enjoying the game. I still have fun but I can't turn the meta-part of my brain off when something isn't done the way I would have done it.

Hmmmft.

@tragedyjones said:

Starting to sound like we may need a TT via Skype going on.

I don't think "table" means what you think it means!

Do/did you play in a tabletop game now or in the past? Yes.
What games(s) do/did you play as tabletop? AD&D, D&D, Shadowrun 2/3rd Ed, Vampire: the Masquerade, Hunter: the Reckoning, Vampire: the Requiem.
Are/were you the GM/ST/DM at your tabletop? 95% of the time.
Would you tabletop if you had the opportunity? Yes.
Do you have the opportunity but choose NOT to tabletop? Not quite. The groups in my area seem to be too young for my tastes and none of my friends play RPGs.
*Misc: Table-top is where it's at. Pizza. Dice. Bad jokes. Rules lawyering.

And also they aren't really meant for us (as in, the MU* crowd, people who are interested in running consistent and often multi-sphere campaigns which last for years and take massive amounts of efforts - in terms of coding, building a grid, setting up a wiki, etc) to get going.

So if there are interpretations of Changeling or whatever which push different buttons, have a different range on the faerie elements versus the traumatized victims angle or whatever else... players are supposed to just pick the version which better fits their vision.

I mean for their intended purpose you can switch from 1.0 to GMC/2.0 in a few minutes as long as someone at the table knows the rules. This is a non-issue for the products, we're the ones who're repurposing them a bit.

@Autumn said:

Have the metaplot be like the elevator pitch for a continuing TV series, maybe. You're not a writer or a director or even the producer for a particular season (although you'll probably wear all those hats at one point or another); you're more like the studio head who says, "I want to do a show about ordinary people getting superhuman powers, and how they deal with the way the world and their lives change as a result of that."

It's not a bad idea to borrow a few pages from TV show writing - obviously there are vast differences but there are also similarities in the creation of a persistent world (rather than generating just enough for a single story with a very specific beginning and end, which is more in the domain of movies).

I can't find it at the moment but I think it was Whedon who came up with a formula for an eerie similar issue they were faced on TV. See, a show needs to retain its loyal audience and providing them with metaplot is a good way of doing that since they retain their curiosity and invest in watching to see what happens, but they also want new viewers to not be alienated when they happen to catch just one episode and they can't tell what the hell's happening since everyone's referring to events and people they don't know about. Evidently a good formula is 1-for-2 (again if I remember correctly) - one episode dealing with the metaplot followed by two self-contained ones, leading up to a season finale.

Maybe we can use a similar framework and much for the same reason. We, too, have casual players who can't be there for everything being ran and we have people who have been engaged in storylines they'd like to follow to their pay off. So there should be a mix between such long-term engagements and one-shot things so everyone is satisfied to some degree - not necessarily in the same ratio used on TV of course, but the general principle can probably hold up to a bit of scrutiny.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

It makes a world of difference to Vampire, but that's about it.

You don't think GMC's Werewolf is different than 1.0's? It's dramatically altered in both theme and mechanics.

@faraday said:

But when you think about the user experience, IMHO it becomes a little murkier. Right now I can have multiple character windows open across multiple games, yet still have a central client to flip between them and a central notification system. The games all have a different syntax, but fundamentally they all work the same way and I interact with them in the same way. I can save logs to my desktop easily. Replicating those core experiences in a web client is going to be a challenge.

Oh, it is a challenge. It's a crapload of work - no arguments there. Doom 2 had to go through that crapload when they went up from Doom 1, right? But all I'm thinking of here is the user experience, so to use your paradigm:

• A web browser can have as many tabs open as your machine can handle. Isn't that central enough? Notifications can be easily implemented.

• Since we're talking about web development at this point there are a zillion libraries and methods already available you can use to do this without having to rewrite your own from scratch. Compare that to the meager resources a handful of our community's enthusiasts have been kind enough to share with us so far.

• Logging can be done much more efficient on a web browser! You could implement an interface so you can mark part of your backscroll and send it straight to a wiki log for instance, ready to be used - or you can keep your existent method (is it harder to copy/paste from a web client's tab into your editor of choice than from SimpleMU?).

• You can do context-sensitive stuff. Like... right click on a person's name and you can PM, view their wiki entry, add them to a group conversation - how annoying is it to update pages to multiple people? - or whatever else. Or... you're looking at a help file, and just click the hyperlinks to read the next entry.

There really is no comparison, folks. The feature sets are a world apart. Hell, you could conceivably implement a web interface that's identical in every way to SimpleMU without a single thing missing - but why would you?

All that's missing is hands on deck to implement what we already have - and if people like those who're offering Evennia are doing part of the grunt work then the only correct response is gratitude. Even if I never touch their code or play a game they made, it's silly to berate them because what they're doing isn't providing us with all the bells and whistles - the result of so many years of development - yet.

@faraday I've been using MU* clients since '93. I know what you mean - change is always an issue. We have our toys, we're used to them, and knowing whatever it is that comes next (assuming something does) won't have every single one of our favorite features - at least right at first - is a bitch. I get that.

But are you really going to miss the arcane incantations we're now using to set a +sheet in CG (with a syntax slightly different on each MUSH) as opposed to seeing a character sheet probably very close to the ones used in pen-and-paper games to fill it in? Which of the two is simpler for a completely new player who just heard there are roleplaying games and is lukewarm about giving one a try? Or, to rephrase it, which of the two is more likely to cringe, close the window and never try again?

Many of us are dinosaurs here. But you know what happened to those poor bastards, right?

Sure, that sounds more reasonable.

My personal barrier to entry (others might have the same issue, not sure) has always been that implementing the basic web interface over say, websockets with multiple rooms, PMs, boards, and all of that with some semblance of security baked in was a lot of work. If you guys have cleared the basics enough to build on - say, your sample web implementation is pluggable enough to make some small changes and see how basic things are supposed to be done - and things are semi-documented so playing around isn't too painful I'd take a shot at it.

@Griatch said:

@Arkandel

Do I think Evennia is it? Possibly not (it doesn't add enough to the current way of things for my tastes)

This sounds intriguing! Is this with concern to softcode or are there some other respects you feel we don't go far enough/add enough at this point?

You're still building over the telnet protocol, which was never meant for gaming in the first place and is ancient, so too many potential features are missing from the toolbox.

So I'm talking about features like using rich text without the need to run a special client (such as saaay a web browser), offering a point and click interface for certain things (such as setting +sheets), showing images, a simple interface to handle PMs and channels, etc. Then if the basic functionality is there future developers could expand and build features from that point on.

@Derp said:

If it cannot do everything that the current environment does and then some then it is not an improvement over the current methods of working.

While that is a valid concern, evolution in the IT field requires starting from scratch. The developers of every game engine ever look at the old version and see so many things which are built on it they'd need to replicate all over again - and they know they won't right at the beginning. All those custom maps and mods won't work right away until the same creative people who created them look at the new system, realize its advantages, and (hopefully) buy in.

Now, there is an argument to be made that only difference between MU* and other kinds of game development is that there's just so many of us, we have very limited resources and we have trouble getting enough people as it is, so why not focus on enriching what we have, as archaic as it may be?

The counter-argument to that is that we have trouble getting enough people as it is because what we are using is so archaic, and as long as there's no change of paradigm things will not get better.

Do I think Evennia is it? Possibly not (it doesn't add enough to the current way of things for my tastes) but whining at people who are modernizing the underlying MU* server implementations but - the horror! - haven't implemented everything we already have after 20 years of development is an excellent way of ensuring they roll their eyes and go do something else with their time.

Which is surely a big win, right?

Metaplot is a tool, like many. Its success or failure hinges both on being used properly, and it won't work at all if it's simply left there on some wiki pages abandoned but 'available'. Alas, it doesn't work like that.

My thoughts:

• Games without metaplot are too sandbox-y for my tastes. There's no direction or theme, people just do things which are forgotten because they're forgettable.

• Metaplot yields are based on investment. You can't just write stuff and expect that to be enough, you need to get your players to buy in. Its whole point is that the world you built has a point and a payoff, so they need to see and feel their actions deliver results.

• Like any other game element, metaplot needs to be easy to access, hard to master. If it is dependent on reading and memorizing a small novel's worth of text people won't do it (good luck even getting them to remember your NPCs' names). If it's too shallow or predictable they'll mock it just to make themselves seem smart.

• It can't be too restrictive. Players need to feel this is there for them, not that they are there for it. It's supposed to give them something to play with and draw story hooks from, then enrich. It may be your baby but if you want it to be theirs as well you need to let it evolve as they do.

• Don't bite more than you can chew. This is really important, IMHO. If you start a massive story you're soooo excited about but you have two storytellers total including yourself and they also need to handle jobs, policies, etc then it won't go anywhere. Scale to your ability to keep things going.

• Make it fun. You need to be entertained as much as your players. Burning out is a lose/lose proposition.