Best posts made by bored

I said 80s but not for the gif-related reasons, but just because it was a good time in comics. Doing a game purely on exaggerated nostalgia would be fun for a laugh but I think it would also be a really short-lived. Comic games in general suffer from a lack of any real attention paid to building an ongoing world and story, so that's probably the biggest thing you want to focus on.

I still maintain that there's a value, and even a necessity for a critical venue and some visibility for it.

You can sit here and promote the rhetoric that criticism is always the monsters tearing down delicate creators, but we also have real examples of games run by the monsters. This whole moderation movement came in the middle of precisely a situation like that (see United Heroes or whatever it was called, a game that ticked every box from deleting all critical speech, to propaganda posts, to staffers sexually harassing players).

The forum needs to be able to handle that. As usual, I do not care about the how, I am ambivalent among different solutions. I do not begrudge anyone their more polite areas. But a publicly visible space needs to be available where someone can easily (and in accordance with forum rules) say that a place is a legit garbage fire when it's a legit garbage fire.

@auspice Or maybe don't blame the entire playerbase?

The game is new and had a lot of initial interest, so its fairly obvious people want to do things. People are also RPing in House because, as discussed, the system encourages it. But I really think the biggest thing is understanding what's available and what the options are. For instance... 30 great houses worth of NPCs? I've never heard of any of them and I'm not sure what they are or what they do if they haven't been mentioned in a specific +bbpost.

We've seen one big NPC who quickly went over to a house. That's good on them, but that process wasn't terribly transparent (personally I thought he wouldn't make a choice right after that first event, for instance), and it may discourage others from acting on that plot thread since it now feels like it 'belongs' to that house. Also people now save their parties/events till the next NPC shows up? Other bits are culturally/factionally/etc coded: not everyone is going to jump on the religious stuff (the religious PC in my house did), not everyone has ties or interests in X part of the world, etc..

Finally, I've had several people ask me what 'Pelcortia' even is. It's definitely @Lotherio's style that he has tons of theme in his head and will shotgun out names of people, places, groups etc. Some of it's on the wiki, but not all, and some requires working out what the historical analogue is supposed to be to make sense of. I'm willing to bet this is another barrier.

Basically: Never assume your players will pick up on everything easily. 3x the info/clues/NPCs/plot hooks/etc for 1x the results. Etc.

@Arkandel

I'd say either your version or the @Salty-Secrets option below (usable vs NPCs only) are your only realistic choices. Rolling generic skills for PvP social is never going to work in a MU environment. We can (and have) argue circles around why it SHOULD work, how people who don't honor dice are bad, awful people, how people who can't pose good social stuff are pathetic RPers, etc, but in the end its just empty sound & fury. It never works, and we know that from experience. That said, I'm not sure powers are in the same category, since they tend to have more defined effects.

Some version of the NPCs-only approach is what many mainstream games embrace (D&D and all its inheritors, Pathfinder, 13th Age, etc) with a pretty self-evident record. They do still have some powers that can control other characters but typically they're very straightforward in the parameters, and where there are glitches in these systems they're usually confined to individual spells/class abilities making it much easier to narrow things down and ban/patch. Otherwise, dice are there to shortcut NPC interactions and work pretty well for that. You can always hand out some bonuses for excellent RP, but the game doesn't hinge on it and it works reasonably well satisfying various player types.

Being honest, probably Robo Rally.

I can get into most of the euro-style worker/econ kind of games, although in that spirit, 7 Wonders is probably my actual favorite.

Also:

@Auspice said in The Board Game Thread:

And though I've only gotten to play it once, I really, really loved Shadows Over Camelot and I think it could easily become a favorite, but I'd need to play it again to be sure.

That'd be a toss-up between Werewolf and Resistance for me.

I really love pretty much all of the Mafia/Werewolf inheritors, and SoC and Resistance are great ways of boiling down the concept into something a little faster and more gamified. If you haven't seen it, you might also look at Salem (the kickstartered card game, not the computerized Werewolf/Mafia Town of Salem, although it obviously applies too). It takes the traitor concept but also creates a card game out of accusations etc.

@arkandel Uh, I'm not claiming my view is popular.

I'm claiming their point view is popular and represents a significant subset of people you should cater to (with the citation being the two of them, along with one other person, having a bunch of posts in the same general thrust in the page or two preceding mine that are all well voted).

@faraday Cool enough. I think your moderation requirements are reasonable for even the current-extant forum. I still think @surreality's desires represent something that cannot be adequately catered to right now.

That's what I'm advocating for, and I don't mean it as an insult at all. I feel like people want this and would use this, and could have this WITHOUT taking anything away from anyone else. I have no clue what it's controversial, other than perhaps a tendency to attribute the worst to one another's intentions (which may be well-earned).

@brunocerous Fwiw, I have no issue with you guys. You're our in-laws! The downsides I see are more general. IE what I mentioned about it possibly turning people off the plot thread (which was already hard to grasp with how vague the this Prince seems) as well as a mechanics-nerd concern over investment returns; if you can spend 1 resource to get 1 resource + change near instantly (which @lotherio seemed to imply was true for your action), then growth is infinite and limited only by who spams +requests faster. That's... clearly broken (and probably not intended)?

But I agree it's important to acknowledge that there's no universal playstyle and the 'spam +requests' mentality isn't going to be universal. Some games run that way, some games don't, some do it via very controlled processes, etc. It's not a universal mode of staff interaction so its highly beneficial to outline to people precisely how they can engage vs. expecting them to figure it out (or +request to get it explained to them).

@TimmyZ Er, what?

I was one of the first people to take a manor on the game, and one of the more consistent players through to the point you gave it up. We might not have been told mud-hut, but we were definitely told we were living at a very low level of development and wealth.

@Thenomain I've played both, but my fondest memories are probably the older one, as it was a favorite in my university's gaming club.

Totally insane, and we had a guy who was far more interested in deathmatching than winning the races, but still. Great game, especially for CS nerd type people with the programming angle, and pure gold for the look of sheer 'I've made a horrible mistake' when people realize it's all gone wrong.

I want to strongly support and echo @faraday's post here re: the VG thread and forum organization.

What she's discussing is precisely what was at the core of my argument the last time around (not in this thread, in the prior one where we talked about the advertisement board). The one where, incidentally, the mods had even seemingly come to agree but then there was no real movement to re-arrange things.

While we've made progress (with the more heavy moderation dev section per the last round of fisticuffs, and thanks mostly to @Auspice apparently ignoring the other mods and general bureaucratic inaction to do it herself), the overall organizational model still seems insufficient and/or incorrect. There's still an unresolved question of what content can go in ad threads, whether it's appropriate to call BS propaganda BS, etc. 'Apology' threads are a pretty specific case, but they run into the same general issues.

@TimmyZ said in How low can "low stakes" be and still be compelling for RP?:

Its some of these pedantics and discussion of castles and manors that's part of the larger bickering issues that showed up at Realms.

Last August on the Historicla Mu's thread, there was discussion about folks discussing the finer points of detail vs the majority of players that just show up for pretend fun time and while to those who enjoy history, the semantics of a building that consists of a few rooms, maybe a wing, down to the invention of the chimney is what drives players away from wanting to wade into historical games. Low stakes seems to border into historical and inconsistency at a smaller level will be noted.

I take blame for misunderstanding and misrepresentation of theme at Realm, as repeatedly said. But as you can see how it mildly turns to disagreement here, this is foreshadowing what could potentially be expected.

I'll be the first to point out that being overly anal about history isn't going to get you anywhere (and I have, I pointed this out to you when you were floating your Reconquista game). That's not the issue here. By all means, if you want to not be strictly historical, don't be strictly historical. Tell people they can wear whatever they want.

You didn't do that on Realms. The issue is you're drawing an equivalency between people who were following the guidelines set for them (wood or weak stone halls, various fashion items on the wiki) and people who said 'fuck your theme, I do what I want,' and calling both sides extremists. You're acting like there's no fault to be found, which is ridiculous. You're also pretty obviously misremembering or outright misrepresenting how a lot of the problems played out.... while sock puppetting multiple accounts, so it comes off as pretty bizarre and suspicious.

@WildBaboons said in [How low can "low stakes" be and still be compelling for RP?](/topic/1759/how-low-can-low-stakes-be-

Real world religion and politics.. don't discuss them with friends or play them on a MU.

You're not wrong, though hilariously the medieval Christianity didn't give people trouble. A big issue was, indeed, the really zealous RL types not only being able to understand that it was a game, but also admit that their religion isn't the same thing. Wicca is a modern invention, and we know very little about Brittonic druidism and other similar things, in large part because the only period sources are Roman (people who wanted to vilify them). But they'd hear none of that

On one hand I am pretty tempted to revisit those glory days.

On the other, I'm not sure it would really actually be fun another time around. Who has time for the grinding, the raids, etc. Is getting 40 people together and focused for 4+ hours even possible these days? Also, for me, classic wasn't really the height of WoW. The early expansions were great, opened up the world a lot and filled in key lore, and most importantly did a lot to make every class spec playable. One of the core 'classic' experiences is getting yelled at by your guild for being the wrong spec.

Saw it tonight.

Without spoiling so much, the Vader scene is worth the price of admission

I think this is a pretty good sign of why a lot of us aren't staying.

The whole Glaw/Gwyanelle thing was always a bit eye-rolly, and from what I heard they clashed with Kay and gave him some grief over not getting what amounted to special treatment above the rest of the playerbase. How he came to the decision of handing things over to them, I can't imagine, but I'm not surprised to see them being a little bit less than honest once they're holding the keys. I have few doubts you'll quickly see the things Kay told them 'no' over quickly come into being now.

@Seraphim73 said in New MUSH 'Game' Mechanics:

@Lotherio If you're looking at two pools anyhow, how about Storypoints and Plotpoints? Other players can give you Storypoints (or fractions of Storypoints, or however you want to handle the math) for taking a failure in any scene (they're given sort of like noms) and can be spent in any non-plot scene to gain a success. They can be used to effortlessly leap across to the balcony to kiss your lady love, but they can't be used to slay the dragon. Plotpoints, on the other hand, are given by GMs (player GMs provide a fraction of a point, Staff GMs provide whole points? Any GM provides whole points? Any GM provides a fractional point?) for failures during plot scenes, and can be spent on successes during plot-scenes.

FWIW, there was a brief period where I was flirting with (and even wrote +sheets etc for) a FATE game (I know, I shit talk it to hell now, but I really loved the stress/consequence mechanic) and I had a plan to do exactly this with FATE points since they serve this same function. Basically there'd be an unmonitored FATE economy for any random interplayer storytelling, and then separate and a more staff-curated version for major metaplot usage and the like (maybe called Destiny or whatever).

They also had different time scales, because FATE assumes you getting refreshes fairly often, but also a consistent TT timetable of scenes, game sessions, and stories. The GM points were going to refresh more on the scale of weeks and months so that their usage wouldn't be frivolous and that compels (basically the mechanic by which you 'lose' to get more points in) in GM scenes would be really valuable and attractive to players.

So yeah, I highly endorse this kind of approach and think it would be necessary.

@seraphim73 said in Star Wars?:

Sidenote: I'm actually against WEG D6 because with large amounts of XP (which is -going- to happen on a MUSH, all it takes is time) Jedi are just obscene. Like, Tartatovsky-Clone Wars-level obscene. And I totally understand that Saga Edition has pretty much run its course within the MU* community.

I owned the d6 Old Republic expansion book way back in the day, and I recall it turned the game into 'OK I one shot you.' 'OK I use a force power to ignore it and one shot you back.' and so on, until you ran out of points or whatever? I don't remember the exact powers this many years removed, but it was lulzy to say the least. So you'd need to but in some boundaries or get dinos killing whole armies, etc.

Re: Saga, I think the solution is (and this is true of d20 on MUs in general) pick some level ranges and stick to them. The leveling is only really problematic when you have level 1s and level 20s in the same environment. Jedi are fine in Saga, and low-levels broken with SF: UtF. At higher levels basically everyone can put together some combo to destroy people, so it's... fair? IDK.

There was some other sci-fi game system I saw browsing around that I thought would work bizarrely well tweaked over to SW, I wonder if I can remember/find it.

@TiredEwok Oh for sure. In all honesty, its still something I might play to level a couple characters (without being faced with the overwhelming amount stuff that exists now). In some ways, doing VC again with a bunch of nooby chars (and not worrying about Heroic modes on even that) is more of a temptation than returning to the glory days of waiting for people to loot Core Hounds.

@Lotherio

Three-six alts x fingers on one hand = still a shitton of characters!

I don't think it was particularly a big problem (I'm not the one who brought it up!), but it was odd and it wouldn't be my preference on a game.

On activity, I think you basically need two standards. You can have a basic one for FCs that's fairly... standard MU whatever, lose the character if you're idle for X amount of time without Y votes/logs, whatever. That works for 90% of characters that exist.

But I'd also put all of the iconic roster (ie, basically anyone who's in the main cast of a movie or TV show) in another tier. Most games only do this with the absolutely top characters (Superman, Cap, whatever). Those people are expected to keep up public activity etc. It's in the job description and sorry, if you're not willing to be a PRP runner, you don't get to play the current hotness characters.

With that setup, staff doesn't have to review every log or monitor everyone's RP. But they do keep an eye on what the stars of the game are doing, and push them along.