How do we emphasize the characteristics above in order to keep our games fun and entertaining?
Most games I've seen ultimately suffer from creativity suffocation. It's often well-meaning but no less stifling - either staff enforce theme and a game style they see as appropriate and flagship characters attain positions of influence over IC affairs and hog the spotlight. At the same time stories being told by non-staff are often self-contained (essentially ran in a sandbox) so they don't stir the game's direction in any new direction, thus refreshing it.
A game has to remain dynamic and its direction fluid. Some ideas in random order:
- Review PrPs ran on a regular (say, monthly) basis. Allow them to affect the game's direction by integrating them along with staff-ran plot.
- Don't let any small group of PCs to hog the spotlight. Charismatic players will still shine without ranks or basing stories told around the same people all the time. Do not open the big ranks to PCs.
- Recruit and incentivize Storytellers as much as humanly possible, and do everything to get out of their way by eliminating red tape and thinking hard before saying 'no'.
- Allow ways for newcomers to catch up in power to your dinos. Some games are very static since a new character could take a year and still be unable to catch up to oldbies.
- Make the OOC impact of death count for less by allowing XP migration toward new alts. A PC's demise should be incentive to refresh, not an event with game-ending potential for the player.
- Let the game be played, staff must not intervene unless there is absolutely no other way even if players request it. The outcome of IC actions should be determined by characters played on the grid.
What is our goal, really? Are we here to play? Are we here to tell a story? Are we here to explore a gritty urban-fantasy-scifi world? All of the above?
What it comes down to is that different people have fun in different ways. Some want violence and gritty themes, others want to meet at bars and chat, others want erotica, others want more politics etc. Overall direction should be stated and be felt through the game, from its wiki to its history down to its plots, but there's a balance between giving players room to breathe by doing their thing and letting players without any direction until they rely on having a pocket Storyteller or be reduced to doing nothing, because nothing happens spontaneously.
Sometimes a game is perfectly fine, well-coded and ran by good people but it falls flat because it's too open-ended and lacks internal coherence. So whatever the goal, there should be an overall theme if not metaplot, and the environment itself should somehow confront the characters' choices by applying pressure on their outcome. By no means should things be safe or quiet; that's how boredom is generated.
Are there any other characteristics worth adding to the list? Or any of the above that really don't apply to MU after all?
The sense of community, perhaps. The players I see most often being lost in the shuffle are those who feel disengaged from the MU* because they have no ties to it. They may be in a faction in name but how does that translate to RP? They are offered a bboard to search for a pack but what happens if there's no one forming one?
Building communities should be considered an integral part of running a game. Yes, of course players should be responsible for themselves, use the resources at their disposal etc... but they don't. Sometimes - often - they sit in a room and wait for something to happen, and if nothing does they stop even sitting in that room. That is a loss. Plenty of players are good at posing, less great at taking the initiative, generating RP, starting a coterie/pack or too shy to even make a post and I've seen in sphere 4-5 people all complaining at the same time they're unable to find anyone to group with.
A systematized effort to play at match-making can make a ton of difference. Scale it down to the faction level so that it's not all depending on a huge bottleneck by staff (who have enough things to do); prominent characters in a Covenant can be IC handed the obligation to whip their lone wolfs into cohesive unit, for example. Give tangible benefits on top of that (say, a free locus for every pack of 3+ PCs) and try to make sure to either run or offer incentives for PrPs to be run that bring such groups together.
That's all, from the top of my head.
