Posts made by Bad at Lurking

I love Unisystem and love the Witchcraft/Armageddon universe. So yeah, hearty thumbs-up from me!

@prototart said in #WIDWW pt 2 - ST, Player, or staff?:

i now badly want a 1950s beach movie oWoD game just saying

Bloodbath Bingo!

3. By a very wide margin. But I'm a sucker for a space opera/exploration/worldship story. =D

@magee101 said in Gamifying Plots:

@bad-at-lurking said in Gamifying Plots:

@ganymede

I'd love to have that kind of time, but MUing is not a job and I'm fairly sure that if I stopped feeding him, my dog would eventually eat me.

Just to put some perspective. As a Player ST fairly reliably for two years straight, I keep up a househild, raised my daughter, and still found time to run 1-2 scenes per day for people, either private or on grid. Yeah I didnt have a job I was the stay at home parent but keeping a kid alive and happy and learnung and keeping the house up aint a vacation either. It all depends on your passion.

With all due respect, just because you have done that doesn't make it a reasonable expectation for others. I know myself and I know that if I don't keep running a game in a healthy balance with the rest of my life, I'll burn out on it. I think it is unreasonable for any of us to decide we know what that healthy balance is for anybody else.

(It's surprising how many times I had to ediit that so it doesn't sound like I'm being judgemental or combative. If I didn't succeed, please believe that it isn't intended to be either.)

@ganymede

I'd love to have that kind of time, but MUing is not a job and I'm fairly sure that if I stopped feeding him, my dog would eventually eat me.

@ganymede

No argument about running something for a solo player being easier, but in general, minute for minute, there is less value to a game doing things for one person at a time as opposed to spending that time on a group.

@magee101 said in Gamifying Plots:

@arkandel its a little more than that. Clqiues tend to be groups that alienate players that are not part of their group, have high barriers for entry, and tend to give far too many fucks about other groups or individuals to the point of bullying.

I may be a wild optimist at heart, but I think I'm going to wait until we get the game up and running, attract players, get groups, let those groups get comfortable with each other, start plots, establish those groups as dominant social factors and then attract yet more players to possibly be alienated, bullied or otherwise abused before I start seriously worrying about it.

Frankly, I'd be thrilled to have all that happen so I have to deal with that sort of problem.

@lithium You have a point.

I still don't think that giving preference to group activities over solos is a bad idea. But I am seeing that I need to give solos more time than I originally budgeted.

@magee101

There is a difference between 'clique' and 'group'. At least in implication.

Also, I look at it this way: I have to budget my time for running the MUSH and so do my storytellers. Right now we have a coder and a couple of us who will end up builders/storytellers/general dogsbodies.

If we start with two storytellers, with X amount of time available, we have to look at what is going to provide the most 'value' for our spent time. In this case, I'm defining 'value' as 'things that help our game grow and keep the players engaged'.

Giving a preference to spending that limited resource in the ways that return the most value is not unreasonable, it just goes against nerd sensibilities that nobody should be left out. And I sympathize with that. It does suck. But if you make the decision to be a loner on a game that emulates a genre where the dynamics are usually group based, I'm not going to incentivize that kind of play. I'm also not going to punish it, as we are planing on using a 'dispense a plot' system for semi-random 'episodes' that can be tuned for one person or a group.

We're going to take a stab at maximizing return for investment to start with and then adjust if that tactic doesn't look like it will be fruitful in a MU environment. And if/when we attract more storytellers, that preference will be less noticeable.

@misadventure

I'm more of a fan of presenting things as an option and letting people do what they want to do, within reason. Encouraging behavior is a less intrusive tool than demanding it.

@misadventure said in Gamifying Plots:

No comment on your actual question, but I will say that unless you make sure that staff do not spend more than 50% of their time on purchased plots then you will defacto be saying that you need to be in a group to get staff run plots. It won't be on purpose, just folks being busy. Just something to be aware of.

Honestly, I'm not sure I have a problem putting solo players at the back of the queue. In terms of keeping a MU going, people who invest in the game by getting involved with others tend to bring more value to the game.

If that sounds a bit mercenary, it is. And I'm okay with that. I think it's fair and reasonable to put your resources where the game as a whole benefits most from them.

I am, of course, willing to listen to opposing viewpoints on it, but as a long-time player of MUs, I haven't noticed lone wolf types contributing much in terms of keeping others entertained and engaged.

Yes, it's a bit of a misleading title because plots are already part of the game in a MUSH environment, but it gets across what I'm trying to say.

The project I'm working on emulates TV urban fantasy as a genre and one of the conventions of that genre is the Scooby gang, (or the pack or family or whatever). Few protagonists truly go it alone in the TV version of UF. Which is a great thing for a MU, because group play is play that tends to heighten player engagement for several people at once and often spills out to other groups.

To encourage that kind of play while avoiding punishing those who do wish to be lone avengers of the night, we are likely going to be giving out plot tokens on a monthly basis. Accumulate enough tokens and you can turn them in to get a staff-run plot, personalized to your player or group. We are tentatively looking at one or two tokens a month per character and a base cost of ten tokens per personalized plot.

For the purposes of our game, each of these staff-run plots would be the equivalent of an episode or two of a TV show in which the season story arc is furthered, rather than just a 'monster of the week' episode with minor story elements. (Though we do have some awesome plans for monster of the week plots that won't even require staff involvement except for loading up a plot dispenser object with NPC+Location+Situation Madlibs blocks and then reviewing the logs for future plot hooks.)

Players can pool their tokens within a particular group as long as they are flagged as belonging to 'X pack' or 'Y family' or 'Z coven'. So while a hardcore solo player can reasonably expect a personalized plot every five or six months of play, a group of three to five players can expect one every month, storyteller time permitting.

My personal thought as the game Producer/HeadWiz is that we want to encourage folks to buy into the genre conventions and game events, rather than freezing out those who don't. And the plot tokens can be a useful meta-currency for rewarding behavior we want to see or for taking up roles we want to see filled.

Have any of you tried something like this before? Or played on a game that did? Did it work? Would you, as a player, appreciate such a system?

@thatguythere said in 'Inspired by' rather 'This Work: The Mu':

While I am all in favor of not having FCs in a game, I think one of the big issues with inspired by a genre rather than a singular property is there is a lot more decision making over head before you start. For example lets take a vampire, are they affected by crosses? What about garlic? Wolfsbane? Running water? Will a stake in the heart kill them or render them immobile or kill them but if someone moves the stake from the corpse they pop back up? etc. All this leads to a big task of getting and keeping everyone on the same page.

I do technical writing for a living. Weirdly enough, if you slap a semi-related graphic (even if it's a stock photo of an 'engineer' or 'doctor') up there beside a short list of bullet points, even your more, ah, 'hands on' learners tend to retain basic information. A concise, snappy wiki write-up can do wonders.

Something like:

Vampires: Welcome to the Suck

• Sunlight bad. Vampires can be active during the day, but they burn in the sun.

• Garlic is only a hazard if you're planning on kissing somebody.

• You can only be one kind of monster. Vampires can't infect werewolves. Werewolves can't infect vampires. Zombies can't infect either, but that doesn't stop them from biting all the things.

Etc.

The Teen Wolf/Mercy Thompson interest check and my own experiences on MUs that were based on various media properties have me thinking about something I don't see much of in the MU world. Which is to say, MUs in the style of a genre, but not tied into any one media mythology.

Having played in games based on various urban fantasy series, from City by the Bay and Windy City to Devilshire and Let the End Times Roll to Dark Spires and that Dresden game set in Louisiana (I believe), the latest attempts at Supernatural and Shadowhunter games to the two 'ultimate crossover' games that popped up in the last few years, I've come to believe that a direct translation/adaptation of various properties is actually kind of limiting. Most of these shows only fill out their mythologies as far as they need for a given monster of the week episode, if they think about it at all.

On the other end of the scale, games like Mythara: At the Crossroads, which attempt to reconcile everything from Charmed to Teen Wolf under one roof, suffer from having no cohesion or tangible overarching theme to unify the various spheres and keep a game going. Not to mention, in a game where you have FCs, a lot of the play is going to be about having those FCs fuck. No judgement there, but it's not the sort of thing that attracts and keeps a wide player base.

I find myself wondering if a game that is inspired by a given genre, like TV Urban Fantasy might be a good way a go. Taking elements from Buffy, Teen Wolf, Charmed, Bitten, Dresden Files, True Blood and the rest but written from the ground up for a cohesive cosmology and setting, so the parts work together and your various spheres wouldn't be unevenly developed. I think all of those shows have enough things in common to be there own genre and have their own genre conventions, unique from even the literary versions some of them have.

Getting rid of Feature Characters and the various ways writers destroy their settings in the final seasons of a given show seems like it would open up a lot of fun for the players and using a broad setting but narrow theme could provide enough narrative framework to attract a population and keep a game going.

On the other hand, if what I'm proposing sounds like World of Darkness Lite, that's because it functionally is. WoD without the quirky and very distinct cosmology and mythology of those games and with a more 'monster of the week/big bad of the season' and 'Scooby Gang' focus.

Note, I'm not proposing a game yet, just wondering if anyone has any thoughts about something like that being viable or if it's been done and why that did or didn't work.

@thenomain said in Interest check - Teen Wolf/Mercy Thompson MU:

@bad-at-lurking said in Interest check - Teen Wolf/Mercy Thompson MU:

More than you wanted to know, but I seriously enjoy these books, so I gush a little.

This makes you a positive advocate, and someone who would find good things in a Mu* of this stripe, so gush away!

I am still going to make fun of her, er, wolf paw tattoo, though. Is that some kind of new thing to indicate that you’re, er, smooth down there?

If it is, wouldn't we have seen it popping up on the rainbow haired sex pixies on MUs by now?

@thenomain

I enjoy them quite a bit. The world building is solid and interesting. The world itself is dynamic. Werewolves come out of the closet a couple of books into the series, for instance, and the Fae are theoretically confined to Native American-style reservations.

Her vampires are the anti-sexy. Or rather would appear sexy to people who are screwed up in terms of self-esteem, but even the 'best' of them is slowly killing his or her harem of human followers with no real thought of moving them off a path of self-destruction.

Similarly, her witches are not superheroes with Charmed style powers. They are awful people who do awful things and even the 'good' ones are kinda shady.

Sexuality and gender are interesting topics in the books. Some (maybe most) werewolves were raised in societies that saw gay people as perverts and women as second-class citizens. On the other hand, when the gay guy or girl can beat the shit out of you (and will, in the occasional dominance battle), you either learn to suck it up or move to a hyper-conservative pack. Two of the most interesting supporting characters are strong werewolves who have to work that much harder for their respect because he's gay and she's a woman.

But by the far, the strongest selling point of the books for me is that they provide an example of how a character who spends all her experience in social attributes can be absolutely amazing in play. Mercy never really gets that much stronger, thus far. She learns some self-defense and how to shoot, but her main strength is in networking and making allies.

Also, the character on the covers does not reflect the character as written, according to the author herself, who noted that her contract doesn't give her a final say in the cover art. Mercy is a short, hippy, noticeably Native American-blooded character (in terms of features and skin tone) with less than giant tits and one small tattoo in a place nobody but her husband usually gets to see.

She is not 'roller derby Indian Barbie', as presented on the covers.

The weakest parts of the series are Mercy's quest to figure out (and then understand) her own heritage as a coyote shifter without most of the cool superpowers werewolves get and the fact that the author relies a little too heavily on coincidence in her stories. Not ridiculously so, but more than she'd have to if she plotted them a bit more tightly.

Also, none of the 'old guy' club of werewolves are particularly good people. Don't read these books if you have to like the authority figures and loved ones of a protagonist. Mercy has blinders on, because she was raised by Bran and his sons, but the older werewolves are total dicks to everybody except the two point of view women of the interlocking sets of novels. (The Mercy books and the Omega books both share the same supporting cast and world.)

More than you wanted to know, but I seriously enjoy these books, so I gush a little.

@wildchild

I think there could be a lot of potential there. The way the Mercy books handle the fae and vampires, for instance, would make for some truly terrifying monsters of the week for a Teen Wolf-style pack.

I think the biggest hurdle is the power difference.

For those who don't follow either the books or the tv show, Mercy werewolves are absolutely terrifying. Not quite as powerful as Anita Blake werewolves, but we're still talking about hulking rage monsters who are functionally immortal, until depression or major structural damage kills them. (Seriously, there are at least three werewolves in the series who are over a thousand years old.)

Teen Wolf werewolves ... get kinda cute/ugly with a minor partial shift and are stronger/faster/regenerate and have super senses, but only the Alphas can manage to go WoD-style crinos or full wolf. In terms of raw power and danger factor, they are a few steps down from Mercy werewolves.

I'd love to see either, but ...yeah. Grownups would be nice.

The Mercyverse would be especially interesting, but you'd have to write the hell out of theme to get people to understand that submissive and Omega werewolves are different things in Brigg's work, neither of them sexual in nature and probably not as suited for their snuggle party and hurt/comfort fic as the players attracted to that kind of character might think.

I, for one, welcome our Radmoose and Robo-Mountie overlords.

I tend to like a compromise. Hub rooms to represent neighborhoods and then a few places each to represent places of interest. With exceptions for parks, hotels/housing, of course.

I do enjoy exploring a grid, but generally, I only do it once. And nobody else ever goes to that cool room with the ocean overlook unless they decide to build a house there.