Posts made by Arkandel

This thread is in the 'mildly constructive' section.

If people want to dogpile or point out personality flaws of Theno's, or Arx staff's, or anyone else's please go somewhere else to do it.

@thenomain said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

Either 'ad and updates by the poster only', or make it part of the constructive forums in general.

It's already been done. I prefer the wiki route but it will need to wait until the personnel exists for it.

In the mean time I wanted to publicly praise you for one thing, dude. When you fuck up, you own it, and where you know you're flawed you acknowledge it.

Not everyone here has the self awareness or nerve to do as much.

A good trick is to literally maintain the FAQ with questions you see asked often.

So if you ever think "dammit, I just answered this one yesterday!"... well, that's a good candidate. They don't need to be one-offs.

@faraday said in criticism not allowed in ad threads is only enforcing a false positive, prove me wrong:

It's all well and good to sit here and say "Well if you can't take criticism, don't make a game."

Or run a forum.

And let's not fool ourselves about the supposed "purpose" of the community being to warn people away from bad apples. Most of the commentary in these ad threads isn't "warning" anyone. It's rants and criticisms and doomsaying about decisions that game-runners have made, and it's freaking demoralizing. Even if it's not your game!

A lot is. And some is not. I don't know if I'd quantify that kind of thing with any degree of certainty, though.

Another thing to be wary of is just how prone we are as a community in forming bandwagons, so when someone is down others line up to give in that extra kick; one of the contributing reasons some people or games are more frequently blasted is because it's 'safe' to do so as they won't stand up for themselves either because they're not here or because the line will form again like that famous Airplane! scene.

But do I doubt a lot of those "hey, tell us more specifics!" kinds of posts are popcorn bait? No, not for a moment. Do I think some pretty scummy individuals have been exposed here because they can't shut their accusers down? I do think that, too.

We have to take the good with the bad, even if we can also take steps to skewer the ratio of each.

Not stomping all over their game advertisement is one way to do this.

I forked some of the recently active ad threads already (HorrorMU* pending for when Botulism logs on to decide on it). There's a separate discussion thread for each in the Mildly Constructive forum where the existing posts were moved. Unfortunately nodeBB's interface is terrible for this - you can't fork the original post at all, only replies to it, so for example you have to click on 288 separate posts in a long thread instead of 1 if you want to separate them. But that's why I get paid the big bucks.

Anyway, enjoy!

@theonceler Yes.

@faraday said:

b) Perhaps (probably) I'm jaded, but it seems like a moderation nightmare waiting to happen. Especially given how prior attempts at MU game/people wikis have turned out.

It's not my place to judge anyone else's jaded status (I have my own cynisisms reserved) but I don't believe in extrapolating from past failures to pre-emptively discount fresh attempts. Especially before the actual design of how the wiki will work or who will be able to edit what has been completed yet.

And I don't think you can argue it would give us options in terms of seeking out games - which is what ads are about - we don't currently have. If you're a random player coming over to MSB to look for a certain kind of game you might be interested in looking at different things, and no matter what forums aren't meant to provide that. This would be a new feature for us.

So that is not the change I want to see in the world. The change I want to see is a clear, enforced policy on what goes where here.

That's not mutually exclusive to having a wiki. I don't care to keep policies which aren't working out or which don't accomplish what they were created to do in the first place.

@meg That's what the peeves threads are for!

Look, I know this is an issue. It's not one of those things where we all need to agree-to-disagree. I'm not happy our own rules are not being consistently enforced; perhaps I need to hire one more moderator but at this point it might be more that system itself that needs redoing.

I am hoping the wiki will improve on game ads by providing us with options we don't currently have.

Wow, this thread happened really fast.

So the idea has been so far to create a wiki in which ads could be posted by game staff, and those would include links to the forum in the Constructive or (if one exists) the Hog Pit threads about those games.

Once there is a volunteer to create the wiki we'll try that schema out since, as it's obvious, the current way does not work as well as it should.

We can lock threads when they are first created here, too, but there are drawbacks in the approach since this is a forum. For example there is no categorization whatsoever (per genre, beta/fully open, possibly other tags as well).

So you can be the change you want in the world by stepping up! There's been a post on the Announcement section asking for a volunteer for a short while now, and the position is still unfilled.

I think it's unfair to call out a game which isn't open yet for missing features which, if they already had, they would be open.

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I agree, and disagree, with the amount of work. I think you're front loading your work with something like this.

Costs: Additional up front work of writing the scenarios, designing the flows, tracking the results of the scenarios and communicating

Pros: Instead of needing to 'run things' 3 times a week, you may have one day a week of 'work' in doing the above.

For myself, I think the trade-off isn't the worst ever.

We might need to come to MSB's infamous agree-to-disagree state here.

Generally speaking it's far harder and more labor-intensive to communicate with and coordinate STs than to run scenes yourself. It simply is - there are all kinds of efficiencies which as staff you can develop over time when you're experienced at running plot, starting with:

• simply knowing the rules (in many cases being the one who made them in the first place)
• understanding the combat system (many perspective STs I've spoken to have mentioned this as the reason they want to but don't)
• having the players' respect (fewer people try to go over your head to 'make sure you're right about this ruling')
• finding out exactly what happened (the log might not show incorrect rolls or use of mechanics, misleading pages, etc),
• and of course dealing with actually malevolent players which on their own can send you spinning your wheels for a long time.

I think the key to all of this is getting that early momentum going. Once you have it things become so much simpler; engaged players whose characters are already interested and have a stake in things will ask you questions, point out ways to enrich your plots, can easily run something on the spot for you if you ask them since OOC they already know a lot about the situation, etc. When you don't need to chase them down but they are coming to you then you got'em - but the first few weeks, sometimes months, require a lot of constant vigilance and grooming to the point of micromanagement.

Most games don't have the staff who can do that. It's easy to spot, too, when there's a surge of activity early and then the momentum dies down as people sit on their thumbs. In my opinion the first month after opening is critical for a MUSH; it's too easy to get the kiss of death from a surge of characters getting created followed by nothing at all; once the surge is spent if there's nothing else going on... well, things get tougher from then on.

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

What if that /was/ the methodology of the game. From Day 1 it was established that there are free form scenes (your BarP), there are Drama Scenes (Pre Generated outlines from staff that are meant fo rplayers to run to advance the story of the game) and then climax scenes where the results of the Drama Scenes come out.

I'll talk about the elephant in the room here. I'm not doing it to offend anyone but it needs to be said.

To do anything like this has a major payoff. It also entails a crapload of work - active work. Think "I log on every day and spend a long time talking to people, answering theme questions, giving solutions, enriching their plots with metaplot clues" and not "I put a paragraph of stuff on the wiki, somewhere".

The vast majority of games are not ran by staff either willing or able to do this. That's the reason this isn't done more often - and I get it. I have no idea how Darinelle et all do it on Arx because it's... an insane investment of effort, especially at first when you don't have a momentum built up and players heavily invested in giving you the positive feedback required to keep going.

The temptation may be to say 'well why wouldn't people just do nothing then show up to the Climax Scenes', maybe it could be limited to priority to those who participated AND ran the Drama scenes getting the first opportunities for the Climax Scenes?

Yeah, that's the other thing. Players who show up for the payoff - who just appear in the final scene to fight the Goblin King - can make thematic sense ("the King has sent reinforcements") but it can significantly lessen the emotional impact of it for those who were all in from the start.

Addendum: Climax scenes are found very often on Shang.

Please, no one ask for citations on this one.

@tinuviel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

If you want to reward players, don't use XP. Find something else.

Okay, that's a fair point you and @faraday made. More carrots would be good - something with an in-game effect to draw characters out should work. It'd be best if whatever it is scalable; not to diminish what @Apos and others do but (for example) coming up with meaningful secrets on a huge scale is more work than many game-runners intend to be part of.

For some unfathomable reason players like achievements, too, or other purely cosmetic thingies without any effect at all. For all those weirdos meaningful RP participation could be a source of those (although 'meaningful' would need to be defined somehow).

There definitely does. The two biggest hurdles here are 1) People like me that don't want to run stuff, and 2) player-run plots being seemingly immaterial. The former isn't ever going to be solved, as it's not really a problem. We're there to play, not work at a thing, and that's something that just has to be accepted.

Ah-ah, you're extrapolating on that one. For example I love running PrPs, it's not work but something I enjoy doing. The issue in my case is knowing how much freedom I have to do some cool things too and not just minor also-ran plots, and not having my own character penalized in the process due to the opportunity cost of STing scenes.

The second, however, can be worked at. Many times, in my experience, I've seen player-run plots be basically ignored when it came to the further development of whatever metaplot that's going on. People aren't going to run plots that don't matter.

Yes, that's a big thing. Staff really need to plan ahead for PrPs and allow them to have an impact; if I run a 4-story PrP with dozens of characters in them I expect there to be a payoff for them. In many cases staff in general didn't even know those things happened let alone allow important key figures to count them for things like gaining status, gaining promotions, etc.

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I've proposed in the past integrating this info in the wantrp command. So when you turn wantrp on, you add a sentence or two of the type of RP you'd be up for, and then people scanning the list have a better idea of why they might want to interact with you.

Another thing that can be offered (but with care to not violate anyone's privacy, it should be opt-in and very visibly when set) would be to check the log and timestamps of the last X poses remotely.

So let's say I take a look at +scenes and spot you're in a scene with Bob and Sue. If I can see the past 2 poses from each of you that gives me an idea on whether it's to my liking. On top of it if I notice Bob and Sue are taking 25 minutes to pose each then I can make an informed decision on if I have enough time to do anything meaningful in it.

3. The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

Games have too mush XP period, but that's grumpy old me speaking.

Aside from the amount I think auto-XP is almost meaningless. XP should be something to drive you into doing certain things; that's basically the crux of everything we're discussing here - ways and means to get people Out There Doing Things, yet the most classic tool in a game-runner's arsenal has been reduced to a cron job every Sunday night... for no great reason that I can see.

I've debated having an NPC roster so that players can just grab low-level NPCs and use them for quick scenes and such.

Yeah, or an easy generator on the web to create one on the fly. In my Werewolf example do you need a hostile Rank 2 spirit a party of 3 can take down? You should be able to go to a form, fill this out and it spits out the stats. Done.

It's all fine and good to say that players should be proactive, but when you give them nothing to be proactive about and no tools to be proactive with, what do you expect other than idling?

Nothing, and that's why all those countless clones-of-a-clone sandbox WoD games failed for example. Their runners for some reason thought if they just picked THE RIGHT CITY OF DARKNESS it'd work out, but it doesn't.

@lisse24 said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

I really wish we were discussing ways to encourage players to pursue non-GM driven plot and creating engaging games.

The tricky part here is coming up with ways to do so without offering (perhaps) purely anecdotal methods. For example anything I'm about to come up with is stuff I would like, but my circumstances aren't the same as yours or someone else's. Or, looking at it from a different point of view, I've been chatting with a friend here whose big draw to the game they are playing is that people are sane and no one is perving on them; however for me that's not something I'd pick a MUSH for, as it's not something I deal with very often.

But some methods I'd like:

1. A real definition of how long the scene will take. Man, I can't stay up for a 4-5 hour scene unless it's balls-to-the-walls amazing. I won't.

2. This is codeable (and has been in different ways): A way to tell what a scene I'm considering joining is about. Is that a meet and greet? A political conversation? A fight scene? Obviously this requires participant buy-in though to update it.

3. The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

4. Games relying heavily on themes which involve NPCs need to provide the tools for players to portray those on the fly, consistently and reasonably. For example Werewolf needs spirits - period. There need to be specific, easy to follow guidelines and the culture in place encouraging all players to put some in play even if they're not actively STing (i.e. when their PC is already involved in that scene).

5. More reasons should be offered to meet with and involve other players, especially new ones. Arx did an admirable job of that and other games haven't picked up on it; from being handed XPs just for RPing with them, or with random other players, to sharing clues and learning secrets, this really helps integrate newcomers instead of having them idle then stop logging on for lack of anything to engage with.

Just some ideas for now, since you asked!

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

Do idle rooms hinder story tellers from being able to tell stories? If a player is going to sit social they'll do it either on the game or somewhere else. But how does that hinder story telling?

The boogyman here is opportunity cost. The theory is that while you're just hanging out chatting OOC - i.e. when there's anything else for you to do that might keep you from being on the grid or responding to a "hey, anyone wanna RP?"-kind of request then it reduces the volume of overall RP on the game.

Although on the surface that's certainly true in practice I don't consider it a major factor.

For starters the distractions offered by an OOC room are laughably small compared to the internet as a whole; I'd be far more likely to be distracted by a Reddit post, a Netflix show or any other kind of addictive video game than a random OOC conversation on a MUSH.

For another thing as it's been noted if we're idlying them it literally doesn't matter where our characters are; if I'm not even in the same room as my computer (let alone at the window) then the opportunity to RP with me is exactly the same - zero.

@tinuviel said in Back in my day....:

@paris I'd definitely add that unless it directly impacts performance or health, there's no real reason to disallow someone with body mods from working.

Objectively yes, of course. In practice 'image' counts a lot for some businesses, including departments that don't deal with the public or their clients.

For a milder example my company works with banks and financial institutions so we're not permitted to wear t-shirts at work, including development and phone-support teams our customers would never get to meet.

YMMV of course but I don't think intentional idling on grid accessible rooms is something that happens too much. What's more likely is if there is no OOC room (hell, even if there is) people would go idle in their own, locked apartment. The chance of anyone walking in there is pretty slim.

However I think we might be confusing the symptoms with the cause here. For example when I played on Arx it was quite easy to walk around the grid and find RP. There are other reasons for it but I can't help but think it also had something to do with a billion characters being logged on; there was almost always things happening.

In comparison a game with (say) 10 people on specifically require some sort of coordination for their activity because the chance I'll walk around and find someone else right as they are in a mood to play, or already in a RP, are far smaller. So a PrP or a pre-arranged scene for a specific time might need to do the trick there.

I'm not convinced the presence of an OOC room is that important. In my experience it's still a net negative because people hang out there when they could be looking to RP instead, but that's about it.

The other factor in order for PrPs to happen is that they need to be valuable. Just what adds value to them depends on the MUSH, though, and very much also on the perspective of the PrP runner.

Other than coders Storytellers/DMs are by far the rarest resource. It's however the only true way metaplot can scale on a game other than artificially limiting its playerbase; in other words as your MU* grows you'll grow unable to offer enough plot for everyone unless you actually stop it from growing.

For Storytellers to run things the circumstances must offer them the incentive to do so. I'm not talking about XPs (which is the usual carrot) but reasons to actually invest that time.

For instance:

• STing is a very creative task, so they need to have some freedom to enjoy it - and too many limitations get in the way of that.

• They need to be able to affect day to day RP. If all they can run is mundane events on a game with dragons or spaceships that's not much fun.

• Players must be rewarded for their investment too, and again, I'm not referring to XPs alone. Did you help kill that big ugly? Then the King should know about it - as opposed to every NPC outside the plot being completely unaware/uncaring of what you did since it didn't 'count' as much since it wasn't staff-ran.

And so on.

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

Well, let's run with that.

What is the minimal pieces that a Storyteller or Player would need to have to run a story for themselves and a group? Note, the minimal part.

I would say:

• What to do ("It's about reveling who the bank robber was").
• What information the ST has to disperse to the players ("Fingerprints were left at the scene and he dropped his zippo light")
• What is out of scope ("Don't mention any ties to the Big Criminal Organization some PCs are part of")
• What difficulty is expected for it/what the risk level is ("There may be a shoot-out, so run it as Risk 3: Lethal damage. But try to not kill anyone.")
• What can be rewarded other than XP ("A Contact/Ally point in the local PD is available to anyone who contributed")

@three-eyed-crow The presence of modular plots waiting to be picked up, perhaps so they can be assembled into a whole the individual STs don't need to know about but also as one-shots is an old (ish?) goal of many a game.

I've yet to see it truly fall into place and be used to create stories advancing the metaplot as a whole. Part of it is due to logistics but I also suspect much of it is because of the work involved; it often takes a lot to do all this on staff's side, so much that they might as well just run it in the first place.

But it's a great goal.