Posts made by Devrex

@ganymede LOL oh oh oh got it now. You can make a lawyer joke, that doesn't mean it's not going to go over my head sometimes!

@ganymede ??? I don't understand the objection as to form or why you put question in quotes.

@pyrephox Yeah this is exactly why I started thinking about this, because in the past I have been very "I dunno, if you wanna play it and have points for that go to town I guess" and then have been quietly baffled when someone has made, say, a shopkeeper.

And then the shopkeeper is going: "I can't get any RP around here."

And I'm thinking: What the hell do you expect? Nobody's taking your shopkeeper to the Dungeon o' Doom...why'd you even make a shopkeeper? You're free to make a shopkeeper but why wouldja do it???

It's only now dawning on me that the shopkeeper never wanted to go to that dungeon, they wanted something else that I didn't see or know how to provide and it never even occurred to me that they'd want that thing and so to warn them: hey this game is about dungeon diving and bomb disarmament just never even occurred to me. I'm thinking now: what did that shopkeeper want? What wasn't I providing and what were they unable to communicate to me about it? Is it something I can provide or am even interested in providing or is the answer, very much, as you say, for me to simply put up disclaimers like: this game/plot is your basic action movie and we will be doing basic action movie things here, so please make yourself some sort of action movie trope to have Peak Fun?

I've been thinking a lot about the desired experience of players on a game, or the overarching fantasies of players, and how there can be a mismatch between the experience or fantasy on offer and what the players are looking for. And how I've spent a long time assuming almost everyone shared my desired experience when, in fact, I now think that is not the case.

For example, my desired experience can best be summed up as action hero/hard boiled detective, the Fundamentally Kind Person Who Lives By His Wits, Occasionally Fires a Gun or Throws a Punch, and Solves Impactful Problems while being a great friend and falling in love along the way. All like MacGyver, Daredevil, John McClane, Alan Wake, and Alex Cross type of stuff. I like social stuff to build the stakes and for character development between bomb disarmaments and hostage negotiations and bad guy punching but mostly I want to RP solving mysteries and problems and defeating bad things. I design my characters to try to snag these experiences.

There are other things I like that sort of overlap with these core things, but I get frustrated when a) there is no ability to do those sorts of things in evidence anywhere on a game; or, b) I'm out there STing them for everyone else but can't seem to get them for myself; or, c) I'm out there offering like crazy this thing I'd really like to get for myself and players are still like "Meh," or even getting mad because they're not getting the experience they want.

In the past I've been baffled thinking: what the hell, I'm peddling just as past as I can peddle to give you this great RP!

Recently it's hit me:

Well, Devrex, moron, you may be peddling the experience YOU want but not the one THEY want and that might be the problem.

Yes it took me 26 years to figure out that people might want different things than I want when they play an RPG; I'm real slow that way.

So the question is:

What is your desired experience when you get onto a MU*? What do you do this for? What kind of book or movie are you trying to step into there? I'm hoping this will, when I return to it, make me a better ST/gamerunner and maybe expand the types of experiences I currently know how to offer at all (I do know how to offer some that fall outside of the circle of what I go for, but not, I think, as many as I would like to know how to offer...I suspect I haven't even identified a lot of the possibilities).

I don't imagine I'll be able to grok every single one of them but it would also just be nice to know what gets people back to their keyboards every night.

Dev's Jambalaya

Chicken, cut up into pieces. Basically just use a package of boneless skinless cause I'm lazy.
Flour, in the amount of "as much as you end up needing."
Butter. Also in the amount of "as much as you end up needing."
1 onion, chopped
Chopped Celery - 1 to 5 ribs depending on your feelings about celery
Garlic
Chopped Bell Pepper - bout half. Green.
2 cups Rice
Sausage - I like tasso, if you can't find it, andouille, you can't find that, a spicy sausage will do
2 Beers
2.5 cups water
Seasoning: You can go with straight up salt n' pepper, or you can go with a Tony Chacheres or a Slap Yer Mama

Mis en place makes your life way easier.
You do not need a fancy pot. Any big pot with a lid will do. Must have a good lid.

1. Open the first beer. Take a swig. That's your cookin' beer.

2. Coat cut chicken with flour. This is basically helping you cheat your way out of having to make a roux. Roux is a PITA. Season it up.

3. Toss butter into the pot. Fry up the chicken. When it's brown, set it aside.

4. Throw more butter in there.

5. Throw the veggies in there. Sauté and sweat them until the smell makes you happy.

6. Rice. Water. 2nd beer. Into the pot.

7. Put the lid on. Make sure it's a clear lid you can see. If you open the lid to check your rice you'll ruin the rice. The amount of time this will take to cook is "awhile." It has never been precise, not one time when I've done it. You're looking for little holes in the rice and little bubbles to sort of issue out of the holes like geysers and the moment when it looks like almost all the rest of the liquid has cooked out. If it looks like it's still watery or wet give it more time. I think the amount of time it takes depends weirdly on the beer you use, but don't quote me on that. If you're feeling impatient, sip your cooking beer.

8. Throw more seasoning on upon serving, to taste.

This doesn't give you a brown or yellow jambalaya, so don't worry about all that. It does give you a cheap, easy, filling, and tasty jambalaya.

@arkandel Sometimes it has a lot to do with the culture of the game. I spent a lot of time playing Coulson on superhero games, and of course his superpowers are leadership, mundane spy crap, and being Best Dad Ever in a world where everyone else is throwing cars.

But I was in a culture where there was a lot of emphasis on "selling" each other's special. So the people I was playing with would make room for him to resolve situations with words, or would make room for him to sort of leadership them into a bigger better team, or the GMs would vary up the threats or indeed make "overcome obstacle," in a very freeform way, basically the same thing. For example they might have a giant thing that needed a car thrown at it up there defending the giant bomb that Coulson needed to be down there disarming, and so I'd get to dart in to do that while Superman or whomever was up there lobbing Priuses at dinosaurs. (While making Dad jokes about it. Which is key).

It was nothing that was put in policy, it was just how people played, it was just the culture that was fostered, and it was a lot of fun.

If I were standing in a very different culture where doing that relegated me to being the "guy with no purpose in this scene" I wouldn't do it. I don't need my character to be the biggest badass in the room, I just need him to have a function in the story that matters to that story in a way that I can identify and that I feel like other players can recognize. And I'm pretty big on designing my character to match the play experience I want so I take those things into account.

But that gets into a whole other area of discussion about how to build a game culture intentionally, and unfortunately that's an area where you can only foster-not-force.

@kumakun These are really gorgeous!

When the PCs won't enforce a theme you sort of have to balance it back out with the NPCs in the stories you run. A lot of times we forget all those other people exist out there and so it becomes "oh all I ever meet is..."

In WoT specifically another thing I thought of this morning was about power level. A lot of games let you play Big 3 Special Girl Power Level that was just exceedingly rare. But even they could only "split the flows" (cast simultaneous spells for those who don't know the theme) 4 times. Most people could do ONE flow at a time. Then there was your sort of upper echelon (call it, perhaps, the 'PC' echelons) that could, before Protagonist Gals came along, do two. At most.

And usually in that theme, an average channeler could with one flow or spell impact one line-of-sight target at a time. That's plenty of time for a group of armed men to rush them...which is why they surrounded themselves with bodyguards.

So another method might be to choose your era carefully...or if you're going to put them in the area where a 4-way simulcast is going to be available to most PCs...then your NPCs have to get smarter and mob them with 12 instead of 4. And if you do that on top of no you don't get any kind of melee, you don't get any kind of physical skill...well you're squishy, it only takes one person punching you really really hard to make you lose the spell, you'd better hope your armed men are getting it done.

@arkandel As a fellow enthusiast of this specific theme (though it does strike me as being way weirder about gender and a dozen other things than it did in the 90s) I'd say one thing I notice about WoT games is that they don't typically enforce the drawbacks of being Aes Sedai very well.

These women are not supposed to use the power as a weapon save in the very last defense of their lives or against Darkfriends or whatever else. Moiraine literally hid her face and let Lan handle most things because people would come out with pitchforks and torches if they knew an Aes Sedai was among them. This consequence almost never shows up in these games; it's almost never emphasized by storytellers, and half the time game runners have ignored the fact that canonically, Aes Sedai received no weapons training whatsoever. Seeing AS wear pants is pretty common on these games. Seeing them carrying swords is equally common. You could enforce some by not letting them take brawl or melee or ranged; yes of course the Green Ajah fights but they fight with the One Power and they train to fight Dreadlords and Shadowspawn, not the rank and file.

This makes the warders helpful and relevant again.

If you're not in Tar Valon they should definitely be rare; I only have seen a handful of games where they aren't, and if you're trying to focus on the day to day lives of people in Andor or the Borderlands or something then you probably have to just make them an NPC-only role so that when Plotrelevant Sedai shows up it's meaningful and important and oh she needs the PCs to do a thing (or is bad news bears and the PCs need to find a way to arrow her in the dark or whatever).

If you just go out into some part of the world where they're not relevant and you wanna go Aiel or something then being very clear about the social rules, norms, and mores and only approving concepts that fall within those could help.

And maybe even just saying in your documentation: "Hey guys, we want people to actually want to play warders (or whatever else you want played) so can you please consider RPing your character in ways that doesn't render them utterly irrelevant, here's some examples...could help. Nobody's making those choices maliciously, they're making them cause they seem really cool at the time and because they're being allowed to make them.

@derp @carma Or to know that there were even things that could be done to do that in the first place, which...I did not, until roughly 6 seconds ago. I've met blind players, I just thought they had an assistive hardware device of some form that took care of this. I mean I'm glad I know better now, but it def. wasn't maliciousness that kept me from doing anything special in that direction on games I launched. Just ignorance and...barely being able to remember how to stick someone else's code in the box to begin with, let alone knowing there might be additional features required so everyone who wanted to play, could.

@wretched Especially when eye contact can be physically painful, holy crap yes

@kestrel There's a few commands that only work on client, and...well. The much bigger flashy thing helps me know when it's time to check the web portal. The portal is about 500% easier on my eyes, but I tend to have...a whole lot of windows and tabs and things open because ADHD and so even with the favicons it's helpful to have the big blinky thing. Also some games have better, more obvious, more readable favicons than others. And so I've come to rely on the hybrid approach...even though for awhile there I was exclusively portal.

I think all but four of my current batch of "RL friends" are people I at first met online long before I got to hang in person, so I don't make a divide at all, I just do the same as most here...there's levels, the people I spend more or less time with or am closer with or less close with, but are still friends. Don't always talk to every online friend as much as I'd like to but there's fluctuations in everyone's time/energy too.

@derp Back atcha, man.

You can do just about anything and make it fun if the attitude behind it is right and if you're not just out to get players. I think it's not so much the good guys must win is that there must be somewhere to go other than the doom hammer dropping on the character and the character being taken out of play.

Death is the absolute most boring thing you can do. Imprisonment is fine in the short-term, if you're providing some sort of RP experience to go with it (perhaps a fight in the prison, etc).

"Win" also has a lot of different definitions. If "win" means death or imprisonment and that's all it means to anyone then yeah...problems.

Destroying a reputation/career. Stealing something important. Blackmail. Forcing your rival to work for you/do your dirty work for you/give up something important. Humiliating your rival. Being the bad guy who stands up and donates a huge amount to charity while smiling smugly at the good guy who is about to show up and shout "j'accuse." Driving someone insane. There's a lot of room for story here. Force the other side into a bad deal or bargain.

If you can get folks out of the cycle of capture/jail torture/beat up kill/kill then you can tell a wider variety of stories that everyone is a lot happier with and both sides can walk away with wins and losses. And yeah, characters might just die eventually, it's a risk, but it doesn't have to be first-off go to.

And the harder it is to make the world a better place the more satisfying it is when you finally do.

And this is germane both to PvP and PvE environments, since...GMs/STs/area leaders/IC authorities could also at times stand to get a little more creative in these areas, and to check their attitudes. When I sense someone is just extra excited about "getting" my character or bringing the doom hammer down on them or whatever I shut down; I'm not in it for people to dole out what they consider to be some sort of punishment for whatever. If I sense they want to tell a great story with me and that means my character gets totally screwed for awhile or suffers a major loss? Then yeah bring it on, I'm here for it. Trust is pretty key, building that trust is pretty key. Building on "Yes, but," or "no, but" (in addition to 'yes,and' and 'no, and') is helpful.

Players are perfectly capable of this, of all of this, but it does take work to set up a game culture that promotes it.

I've played 'em, but I sat long and hard and thought about everything else a villain could do besides kill an opponent, stay mostly in those areas, and really just try to make my mindset that when I make a villain it's just like STing: the character is there for the enjoyment of others. I find that when people pick up on that attitude they're often pretty willing to work with me to make things happen.

Not a lot of people go into it with that mindset though, most get very caught up in winning 100%, to the point of being a problem. And get pissed off, for some reason, when suddenly half the playerbase isn't sympathetic with your psychopath and ready to say that everything they're doing is good and right and perfect and justifiable. It would be nice if we could sort of train people to do that without needing a tyrant to keep them from being out of control, buuuuuuuuut I'm not going to hold my breath. All anyone can do is maybe try to do that and be an example for others to see if others will also ride that train.

@faraday Well yeah, I never said it was an inherently terrible idea. I'm having trouble understanding how it might create a better experience or how you would avoid another player completely jumping the shark with a character or even the entire story, but I mean, I'm very "You do you and have fun" by nature. If by design you absolutely don't want anyone ever keeping control of a character then yeah, 24 hours is the right call.

@ominous Maybe with a slightly longer period? 72 hours? A week? Because I don't think anyone could manage to maintain solid control of a character if they had to log in every single day.

@pyrephox Oh sure, absolutely. I wasn't arguing that it shouldn't be made, just explaining why the concept activated my personal ???? response.

@tinuviel Could very well have been, but everyone on the board backed him? Said I didn't understand how to play. And I'm like...well ok maybe my old dinosaur ass doesn't, cause...in my head I was GMing for him until I suddenly wasn't, and you don't take control of the GM's NPCs. But I came out of tabletop long before I came to MUSH, and I think of things in a very specific way.