Best posts made by Bobotron

@Rook
Thank you. I'm hopeful it'll work out nicely.

Relatedly, my 'let's write some damn news files!' music for the game.

https://youtu.be/iGUz9x2E9sU
https://youtu.be/VfqPlhyxmAU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59MA0vIOC44&t=63s

@Arkandel

Make it Easy - How?

For me? I think making it easy to do involves giving people the appropriate resources to do the job effectively: have all of your guidelines posted and there for people to follow. Not just 'here's the levels of involvement that require a staff approval' but give guidelines for, say, how much XP to give to antagonists; general guidelines for what antagonists should be used; assistance from staff directly when someone asks for help; pointers to past plots that might intersect with their idea.

Give Opportunities - How?

The big one I think is to let players play off of staff plotlines or the aforementioned big list o' staff plots. If staff run something, make sure the outcome is clearly posted so that people can play off of that in small or large ways. Give leeway to play out things, or at least ask for their base idea so you can give constructive criticism. I'm very much a 'yes, and...' or a 'yes, but...' kind of Storyteller when it comes to this type of thing.

An example from my Transformers days. On Transformers: Genesis they ran a plot where an Alternate Universe Rodimus ended up on the game's Earth. I played a medic and the staff had part of the plot be 'the Matrix gets a crack in the crystal and the energy is driving Rodimus insane'. So I asked staff 'Hey, I'm a medic, if I wanted to repair this, does this sound reasonable? <list of stuff>' The response? 'Yeah, go to town, here's some info you can put into the plot to seed further stuff'.
The outcome? I organized people to go beatdown Rod to get his Matrix, then interfaced with it, then found a crystal with the right resonance/frequency (which led to a nice space excavation and Decepticons trying to steal the crystal event), then transferred the energy and fixed it. The plot continued from there with info that I was able to seed and give further back to the game from the plot.

But staff being open and giving the opportunity to do stuff with it, was a godsend to keep the plot running even without staff directly doing something with it.

Be open to ideas - how?

Be a 'yes, and...' or a 'yes, but...' storyteller is a good way to do so. Not that you aren't, as I've never played under you that I know of, but being open to ideas (to me) means letting a player give you their full input on their idea, however baseline it may be, and then be willing to help them refine the idea.

Another example from my Transformer days: I played a sonic weapons specialist on the first Beast Wars game. One episode involved the Maximals getting stuck in animal brain mode after having to be in beast mode for a long time. I presented to staff 'Hey, I think this would be fun; how about a sonic weapon, stuck in the Maximals ship but hard to find, causing them to be unable to transform due to energon issues? Thus giving OC Maximals a taste of this, and Preds an in-game advantage' Staff helped me refine the idea and it led to a long term arrangement of plots (build the devices, test the device on Preds, attack on Maximals to insert the device, as the player who wrote the plot working with staff and Maximal PCs on finding the object, the final fight with another Maximal to get the frequency codes to turn off the device after they failed to find it).

Or a more recent anecdote: we have a player playing a dhampir in the LARP, who is using Merits and some powers to mimic being a Neonate Kindred in Vampire society. His idea? 'I want to play an Obertus experiment on the run from the Sabbat'. Staff's response after going over the viability of the idea? 'Cool. And, here's our thoughts...' and he took it and built from there for the character, and we're working with his backstory for plotlines to coincide with that.

Enforce staff - how?

I think 'enforce' isn't the right word I should've used there. I guess 'encourage and cultivate' the culture for staff to run plots that tie into the metaplot by giving them what you've given the playerbase at large for other plots: guidelines, timeframes, the theme head's goals for the metaplot and a stable of ideas.

And example from my history of M3. We ran a plot as staff where the Stardroids (space alien robots) judged the Earth to be unfit to continue to exist, and the timeframe was loosely set, and plot stuff was presented to staff that 'the Stardroids can be challenged and beaten, let the players get creative' and given some guidelines. So the staff (whose staff bits were the Stardroids, which were semi-IC at that period of time, this was yeeeears ago) went out and made plot with those guidelines. We were given a lot of free reign by staff to play with the players, and it worked out really well with us advancing the 'metaplot'. Same thing happened when the game ran through its own version of the Megaman X4 plotline.

Incentives - numbers?

@Derp
My experience is also not a great cross-section of WoD MU*s, particularly the brand of crazy that an ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME game has in comparison to a focused game. Hell, my experience on a game with four competing factions (M3) is still not anything like that. We had people burn out, sure, but that's why you have to be willing to trust the newbies. Sometimes they make the best staffers. After all, we were ALL newbies once..
@Arkandel
If you want to incentivize it for the playerbase and need to do it as XP, it needs to be tailored to the game itself. For example, I have guidelines for TheatreMUSH about the amount of XP that can be handed out for a type of plot that is run by both players and staff. Low-game impact award 1 XP; moderate awards 2; and high game impact (with attendant high risk) awards 3. For GMC, I dunno, do it in the form of 1/2/3 beats or something. This is something that only the individual staff of a game can determine. If you feel staff need to get this reward, give it to them as a reward for their PC as a 'gimme' for running the plot; same as with the player who runs the plot if it's a non-staff run plot. They just gave you effort into doing the thing, so give them a cookie.

As far as staff, here's where my input's probably going to ruffle some feathers, because I really don't believe in incentivizing something that they should be doing as part of their duties as that category of staffer. It's like hiring someone to read and approve character applications and them not doing the character applications without being given a milk bone. If you have to incentivize it, that's a decision that staff of individual games need to make; there's no real way to incentivize in such a way that applies to every game, because every game has different needs and different methodologies and if it factors into the incentive, different systems as well.

Related to the topic of this and staff duties, because that's where this discussion boils down to: do you give people a reward for a job they volunteered for? People can argue 'not a job!' vs 'a job!' all day, but in the end, those you hired for staff are giving you some verbal commitment that they're going to render themselves responsible for that thing you hired them to do It may be often thankless, but they volunteered to do this thing and, if they're a good staffer, should be doing it to better the game for everyone. Incentive shouldn't matter, in my probably extremely off-kilter opinion, because you should be hiring staff who want the game to be better for the sake of the game itself.

But, again, I come from a much different type of MU* background and staffing setup than a lot of people here, from my history with things like superhero MU*s and themed games. There's also the factor of staff who, for wont of a better term, wear a lot of hats vs. a codified, delineated staff. When I staffed on M3, you were hired to do generally one, maybe two, things. Charstaff would do approvals for those factions and work with PCs, generally facheads, as well as theme staff on plots. Codestaff did code. And so on and so forth. Beast Wars Transmetals had a 'staff of many hats' as we all did everything, except 1) only I did code, and 2) one guy didn't do charapps but made up for it in the plot department.

@Meg Oooh, this one is me!

ETA +req faction=Perpetually Has Something In Development Faction

@The-Tree-of-Woe
I think I'm one of the few people who dislike Shockwave, really.

Also, always screw that backstabber. ALWAYS.

@Cirno said:

Is there robot TS on this joint?

Probably not. You missed Decepticon Dominion which had that.

@Coin
Submitting in hopes to do so, I should have totally been more clear.
And thank you very much. I'm hopeful on it; my friend who writes for them seemed to think that doing the setting-based fluff would go over well, as he hears from people that a lot of things like bloodline writeups and such come in for the fluff sections.

@WildBaboons
This year is 20 years for me too.

... god I'm so old.

@DarkDeleria
For myself, I like the idea of a metropolitan AREA, just... I hate trying to do things, or build things, in established cities unless I KNOW the city. I feel like I'm just going to crib things I know from cities I know, and insert them into any city I would play in, and a lot of people are like MUH AUTHENTICIY!

Also, I had at one point thought about the possibility of adapting our old Requiem LARP startup method to a MU* were I to ever do an NWoD game, which was 'the Brood control this city through influence, allies and contacts and are worshiping their dark gods allatime. The Covenants are moving in, in order to flush them out and remove their taint from the city'. And then go from there with an anti-Brood push plot, requiring some cooperation between the Covenant Kindred (and ample politicking, plotting and backstabbing opportunities), and the eventual push out of the Brood and Covenant Kindred taking control and those alliances and such falling apart.

Very ST-heavy start, but player-driven resolution and middle part and going on from there.

Years ago a friend of mine used NWoD core for a general Fallout 2-era game; I could see if he still has some of the notes?

@thenomain

I fell in love with Yoko Kanno due to Macross Plus.
I also love Yuki Kajiura. I fell in love with her due to Mai-HiME and Mai-Otome.

ETA: Speaking of covers and Macross Plus: Laura Shigihara's cover of Voices.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i_m9H2lll8

She also has covers of tons of other music, and has her original music from video games like Plants vs. Zombies.

@ThatOneDude
I had the pause in it. The pause didn't matter. It just treated the whole install as one huge blob of text, no hard returns in it at all, no matter what adjustments I did (short of going through notepad and manually adding linebreaks; which I did in Notepad++ and it still copy/pasted, as a test, as one giant blob).

@Thisnameistaken
A good friend of mine on MUS*H used the same version he installed on his game, which he had no problems with it.

EDIT: I pastebinned it and lo and behold, it pasted with the spacing. Try copying this and throwing it in?

http://pastebin.com/GN6P9YqW

@Gingerlily
The MET system I play in for LARP and what i'm using for TheatreMUSH has status and reputation insofar as 'within your faction' that fluctuates and can be affected by players as you do fucked up shit. Hitting with Negative Status and stuff, which imposes actual in-game sanctions and rewards for being a jackass backbiting vampire, gets a LOT of play in the LARP.

@lotherio

TUXKITTY KAMEN-SAMA!

@SG
I threw it up on my tester, and found one error. You used %N; whenever you want to get something, use %#. %N uses an @name, %# uses the dbref (database reference number), which is an absolute reference to the enactor of a command, and is the most reliable way to grab stuff.

I did a small tweak...

&tdice object=$+check *:@select 1=[hasattrval(%#,%0)],{@remit %L=<Dice> [name(%#)] checked %0 for [die(1,[xget(%#,%0)])]},{@pemit %#=<Dice> You do not have that stat.}

That version worked on my testbed.

EDIT: You could also just switch @select for @switch as well, it works the same overall on my Penn testbed.

@Gingerlily
The Status system in MET: Vampire the Masquerade is built around social play and rewarding you for making good on what you do, and punishing you for fucking up.

You get lauded by positive Status, which gives you a variety of social (and sometimes mechanical) benefits, like allowing you to talk to your superiors without permission, to offset an offense when you fuck up, and a number of things.

You bet punished by Negative Status when you fuck up and can't offset it. Most Negative Status imposes some type of social punishment, though you can go so far as to get ejected from your sect for fucking up too much. There's also some interesting political play with some Negative Status, where people whoa re backstabbing vampire bitches to people with those specific Negative Status getting a special Positive Status for insulting and belittling the fuckup.

Overall it works really well for play in my experience, and I've been using in in live-play with a 30 or so player game for over 2 years. You'd need to tweak it to allow every joe to give positive/negative status a little though, since ia lot of it relies on people in positions of power giving out the status (harpies, prince, seneschal, elders, etc.)). You can look at it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1t3t1c455rcnlcw/METVtM Status.pdf?dl=0

Food.
I love food.
I love that I've found youtube chefs that give their recipes away for free.
I AM GOING TO GET SO FAT OH GOD.

@Derp
This is one of those instances where it's exactly the same, like about 95% of MUSHcode between Penn and MUX.

@il-volpe
The ## is the denotation for the list you generated with @dolist..

Specifically for penn, you should:

@dol [children(DBREF)]=@edit ##/attr=search,replace

IE

@dol children(Snarfblatt)=@edit ##/desc=Flounder,Scuttle

that would edit all the children of the Snarfblatt object's @desc, replacing all instances of Flounder with Scuttle.

What are you specifically trying to edit, if i may ask?

@Pyrephox
As far as #2, this is why so many games have automated, coded combat systems, particularly if they do not use an existing RPG property for their system. If the system says you are hit, it does everything -- proccs status effects, assigns damage, and if you're KOed it sets you KOed. The expectation is that you'll roleplay around the combat system output dynamically. It's an ingrained thing in one line of MU*s and their culture, and allows people to freeform the results if they want to do so.

Is it okay for me to just share a food i'm about to turn into a comfort food? Because my fiance is awesome.

Omurice step 1

Omurice, step 2

@il-volpe
My advice when using parents is to default all the messages to the parent; that way, if you fuck something up, it's a single piece of fix. Now, your messages will all be samey (but honestly, sometimes conformity across the board is fine, it makes things more easy to follow).

@Pyrephox
Yup. I theorized about doing the combat for various RPG-based MU*s (an NWoD MUSH I was thinking about back when NWoD first came out, and for TheatreMUSH where it's a lot simpler, and allowing for Retests in that manner) but ran up against the problem I always run up against: the fact that, in WoD at least, the target can do things like spend WP to boost defense or blood and such to boost physicals, and how to reasonably account for that. You can do it (you can save everything and send it to the other player to react to appropriately, and give all the output and stuff when the target uses the appropriate command to process), but you have to have players who are paying attention to what the fuck is going on around them, which seems to be another separate problem.

Otherwise, things can be coded up as commands that set stats that later affect combat. Turning on/off a forcefield, turning on/off homing on a weapon, adding automatic status debuffs when someone is struck, etc. That's all really simple to code up.