Best posts made by Eerie

@Wizz - Well, I’m going to take off my staffy hat here and answer more personally... For one, while the individual themes and tone of a lot of WoD is dark, I think that it’s very hard to escape the aura of surreal ridiculousness that sometimes ensues when you have a hundred or whatever people playing supernatural creatures of all shapes and stripes and tell them to all go nuts with it in the same place at the same time. ‘Two demons, a vampire and a dog that’s really a werewolf walk into a bar’ is not the start of a joke on a WoD MU*, its Tuesday. I think it’s better to just embrace some of that.

Also I know us. There are many moments that I take a tongue in cheek attitude towards stuff, and I like humor... I think @Coin does too and I know he likes BIG things, broad strokes, and the “occasional” touch of irreverence*... And truthfully, I think that trying to impose a tone of unremitting and constant darkness would actually undermine the themes of these games. You can’t have just the one note all the time in a story if you actually want to feel that note. The moments of ridiculousness and hilarity make a wonderful contrast to the moments of sorrow and despair. When I think back to Buffy, that’s one of the things I loved about it. The silly bits didn’t make the characters one dimensional cartoons. They didn’t detract from the moments of real pathos, they enhanced them. So I think that’s what we’re shooting for here in tone, and hopefully there will be something in it to suit everyone.

Which is, of course, the other aspect of this. What @Coin and I want as STs here is one part of it, but, at best, it’s like a third of the overall formula. MU*s are truly collaborative experiences, and what Eldritch ultimately turns out to be is still going to largely depend on the players. First they have to show up, and next they’re going to create their PCs and those PCs are going to have their own interests and their own ways of doing things, their own hates and loves, and that is a huge and by far the biggest part of what the game will be. I hope stuff like the Territory system furthers that.

The first thing @Coin and I did was basically to sit around and make up something like 500 years of history populated with a number of NPCs that I have lost count of long ago. There is a lot of ‘stuff’ here to use in stories, but my expectation is that some of it, maybe even most of it, will never get played with. What ends up being important, at least in some degree, is going to depend on the PCs and what is important to THEM. And within that, individual people are going to choose the tone and character of their individual story...and that’s exactly how it should be. But we’re not afraid of stuff is what you should probably take away from this. This week could be a heartfelt tragedy and next week could be tentacle monsters assaulting the college synchronized swimming team.

Xbox is up this morning, followed by EA!

My husband already pre-ordered the Pip Boy thing and I quietly roll my eyes. It will still be better than the FPS game that came with creepy night vision goggles and led to him stalking me through the house in the dark. I was secretly glad when they were stolen off his desk at work.

With as long as the merits and drawbacks of various XP systems have been debated, I’m still kind of amazed that anyone believes that there is a ‘perfect’ system out there waiting to be discovered. There have been enough prevailing theories and enough iterations of different systems over time that, for me, I think it’s been fairly conclusively proven that in designing an XP system you’re really looking for a balance which, while not perfect, will not drastically impact any one particular group. HMs ‘play all the time and in giant groups if you want to get ahead’ time/+vote system really slighted people with RL commitments or, frankly, just a desire for less chaotic 2 and 3 person scenes. I’m pretty sure I recall @Ganymede, who has long advocated for games that consider the needs and inclusion of people who are only realistically going to have time to play a scene or two a week shoehorned in amongst many other RL commitments, saying as much though ultimately she both played and staffed there.

As someone with RL commitments herself and who likes not to have to start with a completely bumbling novice character, I loved The Reach’s XP system in theory, but by the same token I think the general consensus is that, several years on, it has its own flaws that make the game environment occasionally weird to navigate.

The XP system is mainly @Coin’s baby, as he’s both more interested in system design than I am and has had first-hand experience playing on Reno, a fully GMC MU*, where I haven’t. That being said, we all discussed extensively what we wanted it to be like and most of these points were considered extensively, including not wanting people to have to start off with the skillset of a high school freshman, wanting to allow for players that came along later to have a clear and non-demanding path to something roughly akin to parity with the ‘dinos’ and also not wanting to see things devolve into the realm of the utterly absurd if we got more than two years on with this. I think there’s a balance to be had there between not taking someone who can only play a little out at the knees while at the same time rewarding activity and contributions to the game since while, no, not all ‘activity’ is going to end up being a breathtaking work of well-plotted prose, at the same time, no matter how nuanced and original someone’s character is designed to be, nobody else is going to get the benefit of that until they actually go RP.

I think that, as this stands, you could make a character and not get around to playing more than two or three times a month and still do really, really well XP wise, especially at the outset. Nine months to a year on, yes, people who are very active will start to pull ahead of you, if you’re the type to view XP as an arms race, though it should still take a while before it starts to be a huge factor, and even then you’ll still be ‘ahead’ of everyone who comes after.

I think, at this juncture, I’m not that worried about it for a couple of reasons: First, if I have a concern about stats and XP at all, it’s mainly that it is really very easy to make something utterly terrifying straight out of chargen in GMC. The power levels are intrinsically high, and (just to pluck one example of many, as this is true across all the games) a straight-out-of-chargen flying Demon with murder hands and the ability to do 8-again agg damage with all firearms is potentially going to smoke anything if it wins init. And second, as I think has always been the case and always will be the case, raw statistical power on MU*s is always going to be secondary to social power. The character who is not around all that often but is thoughtfully imagined, delightful to interact with and beautifully played will be adored by many and eagerly anticipated when they do arrive, will get +recced for their efforts, will be kept in the loop on plots, will have friends and allies aplenty, and will ultimately fare far better than the comparative jerk who has a few higher stats. This, ultimately, gets complained about just as much as XP systems do, and while I think we’ve tried to mitigate both as much as possible and strike a balance, I don’t think I believe in the possibility of eliminating all these problems entirely for everyone for all time, though if anyone can prove me wrong I would be utterly delighted. I think I can speak for everyone involved when I say that we’re committed to collaboration and discussion, so bring on the constructive tweaks. This is part of the six-month thing that Theno mentioned, as the idea was we'd stop at various points and sort of query everyone involved with the project, players and staff, and say: Okay, what do we love about this and what's not working? What do we need more or less of? And while consensus is rare and this wouldn't be a straight-up majority opinion thing, I think regularly scheduled bouts of introspection would be helpful to keep things on track.

@Creepy said:

Based on the wiki data present, the city has a Total Metro Land Area of 73.5 sq. mi with a Metro Population of 732,521.

That's double the land area of Manhattan (33.77 sq miles, not counting the boroughs) with a little less than half its population (1.6 million)... BTW, the setting places Detroit's population into Savannah's footprint.

So, yes, the parallels you quoted are pretty accurate I think. For reference when creating a mental picture, Eldritch is sort of Seattle and San Francisco squished together and settled on the California coast an hour or two south of the Oregon border. I’m from Seattle and have family in the Bay Area, and @Coin lived in San Francisco. We borrowed features from both cities we thought would make for interesting settings and then mixed in other things purely from imagination.

Density-wise, it’s also worth noting that some bits of the grid are much denser and more urban than others. We have a downtown core of four main grid rooms which will be highly dense and very urban, with skyscrapers and high rise apartments. Places like Carson Hill will be moderately dense – lots of retail and apartments, but probably nothing over 5-6 stories. And then there are sections of the grid that, while within the city limits, are probably more akin to what people would consider ‘suburban’, with single family houses and low-rise apartments, which would include places like Ashtown, Breakwater, the area around the University. This will ultimately be reflected in the neighborhood numbers an area has to work with. So, on Carson Hill, there maybe 6 neighborhood points (but we haven’t set figures so don’t quote me on that) to go around in that area, while a very low-density neighborhood might have half that many. Some probably will not have any at all at the start at least. Likewise, as @Coin said, the numbers for the ‘city’ only include the city and not the outlying territory that is still part of our grid, but is run by the county – that would be the desert, the mountains, the national forest, etc.

@HelloRaptor said:

She seems dubious. Are you sure you vetted her properly? Look at all the words she uses in her posts. She's clearly hiding something.

And aww... ~@Raptor~, I bet your fretting about me ~blows~ over in short order. I know you just enjoy getting everyone’s ~goats~.

But come on, its not like I’m hiding coded messages in my wordy posts, right? That's just silly.

(Also hi, @Creepy! We know each other. I played Zephirine on HM back in the day and your fembot and my rosebush were in a motley together.)

I so completely relate to this.

I think a big part of why I have played so few characters and why I tend to stick with one for a good long while is that the first two weeks with a new character, learning/making up their ins and outs and finding their voice, are a bit of a struggle. I have to think about seemingly everything, even trivial things, because it seems to be part of the process for me. What would she want on her pizza? Who did she go to prom with? For me at least, these somewhat inane details actually make them feel real to me and with bizarre frequency actually reflect themes or more important stuff about the character. And then eventually they click and I no longer have to think so much about any of this.

Unsettlingly perhaps, my drunken, corrupt, maliciously bored sheriff's deputy clicked instantly for me. I'm not thinking about that too much.

Some of this is hard to answer in the abstract, like:

Will minor, arguably repetitious actions, that affect a minor number of people for 4 xp a week be allowed, or will they become about Staff hovering and having to resort to telling people no, repeatedly?

This could describe a lot of things. I think @Coin already intimated that, yes, staff would probably not approve the same things over and over again. If your aspiration was ‘brush my teeth’, despite you wanting to do that every day, it would not be a good fit for an aspiration, especially if you submitted it over and over. Aspirations should be a bit more significant than that, even if they don’t have to be OMG earth shattering in every case.

But I think that what you’re really asking is more along the lines of: If there’s a lot of confusion about what constitutes a good aspiration and people start getting mixed messages from different staffers, are we just going to let that go on till our six month review. Short answer: No. If it becomes a problem, we’ll address it! Either we’ll put together more specific guidelines for players and staffers to use or figure out something else that works. That help?

@Coin said:

I am, as far as I know, the only MUer in my country. Not my city, my country. So while I cherish the friendships and connections I make with people who RP online with me, I'll never really get to experience connecting with the people who share my hobby in a face-to-face way that's anything more than temporary and transitory.

It’s funny how I feel kind of just the opposite about MU* friendships. I think if anything this is a medium that can make for particularly meaningful interactions. Like others have said, it requires a lot of time, so you’re likely to spend a good chunk of it with the same people in your group. And beyond time, I think there’s something about the nature of the internet that tends to make people say things that they probably wouldn’t if they were in the same room with people, as anyone who has been in an OOC room anywhere ever and cringed going ‘how is this person saying all this to utter strangers’ can attest to. And beyond all that, I think working on something creative with other people breeds intimacy. This may not be high art, but it is highly creative and invariably you end up putting a lot of yourself into your characters and plots. So constant exposure + open communication + creative engagement I think can really make for some fairly significant friendships. I have lots of RL friends in my immediate area and I’m pretty social, but I see my online friends more and I would even wager that ‘deep and meaningful’ conversation is more common with my online friends than my RL friends. I dunno! I’ve known @Thenomain and @Wretched for years and years at this point and I love them dearly and that was true even for the big chunks of that I wasn’t MU*ing, even though we’ve never met in person.

@Arkandel said:

And with some effort you can create entire worlds, taking anything from the pages of a book, the small/big screen or just your imagination and giving it a chance to become an immersive interactive environment shared with other people. That's pretty special.

Yes this. I think MUing is unique in a lot of ways. I am surrounded IRL by people that work in video games and have pretty much unlimited access to whatever I would want in that arena and nothing else is at all like MUing. I can enjoy a video game sometimes, but its really not the least little bit comparable to MU*ing for me.

That being said, I don’t talk about MUing to my RL friends because it’s very hard to explain. Very very. I suspect it’s really not for everyone and that you have to do it to understand it.

@The-Tree-of-Woe said:

Did you ever think of the implications of fucking with people's desires, sorrows, or anger? It's pretty barbaric. Put some Changeling sparkles on it, and that shit's A-OK, though?

Another part of what bugged me was how many people with emotional abuse issues completely missed the trick on this.

The Changeling seasonal courts are essentially four of the five stages of grief/loss. Spring is denial, Summer is anger, Autumn is bargaining (expressed through their focus on magic) and Winter is sorrow/depression. They just leave out acceptance from the seasonal cycle, but I have always figured that its actually equivalent to being courtless.

My first outing with changeling I really played through the whole idea that changelings were forged by this singular, horrible, transformative thing. It was interesting and made good RP, but I dunno... my second pass at it I went the other direction entirely and made a Dawn Courtier, who are pretty 'over it' by Changeling standards, and I loved the character. I don't feel like I missed anything from the lack of angst about what had happened to her. So I think you can go either way.

As to Eldritch and Changeling, first I wanna see what 2.0 looks like. But that being said, I think that a lot of the worst bits of any sphere tend to become noticeable and amplified when there's nothing to do except battle each other for crumbs. The most pitched of battles on MU*s tend to be fought over the pettiest shit. A setting and a theme and plot that people can interact with meaningfully, I hope, will solve a lot. That and the fact that we're focusing on integrated STing so its more likely that people will end up collaborating against external threats than hunting each other for sport.

I want to absorb the pros and cons of this substantive debate, but I was unable to get past this part:

@Derp said:

@Coin is often more patient with that crap than I am. >

.... Whaaaaaaaaaat? Are you made of... what, Rage, Hatred and Caffeine?

Okay, this is the promised head's up regarding the Demon slots I'll be reopening tomorrow!

At the moment, it seems like I will have seven demon slots to pass out. This could change depending on if people suddenly wake up today and complete their apps or drop out, but this is my count for the moment.

Tomorrow at roughly 11 AM PST/2 PM EST I will toss up a bbpost called 'Demon Open'. After that I will take the first seven +jobs submitted requesting a slot. This does not need to be a concept or anything other than a request for a slot. Concepts and chargen will come after. Submissions that come in before the post goes up will be closed and told to resubmit when the post goes up.

This is obviously not perfect but it's the best I got! Good luck!

I love mysteries and spies, and unsurprisingly have come to love Demon as a result. Consequently, players’ cyphers are one of the things I’m currently fretting over the most with Coin. Between Keys, Interlocks and Cyphers, demon chargen is going to be very labor intensive for staff and a far cry from checking some math and setting a few notes. But at the same time, I really don’t want to dumb down these things in the interests of conservation of staff labor to the point that they lose their impact for players. Discovering your keys is a dangerous process for a demon, so there’s a risk/reward element too.

It’s probably too much to hope that every demon who uncovers their cypher will have a revelatory experience that will make them go ‘oooh!!!’ that becomes a huge turning point for their character, but that’s sort of the spirit of cyphers.

I think we’re leaning towards letting the players help with the process by answering a series of questions that will help staff determine keys and interlocks and also their cypher, which despite being the non-mechanical element of this, is in some ways the hardest. That, ideally, splits the task between player and staff while still preserving some of the mystery for the player.

@Bobotron said:

@Eerie
I love you Eerie and I can only hope that the next game I run turns out so awesome at the start of it.

I feel like I should just close now so I can go out on a high note. Goodnight Internet! Mic drop!

(<3)

@EmmahSue said:

I'll help get it started, but I have no interest in actively staffing on any game but my own, at this point. I'm an adhoc helper-outter and scene/NPC-runner in general for Reno when whatshisname asks, and same for Eldritch.

Hell, that offer is for any of you out there making games. I'm glad to help set-up in minor non-intensive ways as asked.

ES

I highly recommend pilfering @EmmahSue's ideas, she was tons and tons of help both in providing ideas of her own and helping to organize ours. Also if you give her a bit then later on she can potenitally indulge in hi-larious pranks, probably at @coin's and @silver's expense, which makes it a double win-win.

We're super busy with Eldritch but I'm sure @coin and I would offer moral support and our observations muddling through this so far and @thenomain and @chime generally are great about providing their code to the community. From what I have seen there's definitely a desire for this sort of thing.

Re: @Sanguine's question about opening for supers... in addition to what @Coin said about it being sort of tied to the release of Werewolf (remember when it was supposed to be out in November 2014? Yeah, us too.), the other part of this is that we’d hoped that during soft-open we’d start to get supers through the approval process. So the idea/goal is that you’ll also be working on your super (if you want one) during that time, getting them statted, and Demons will get their chargen-specific heavy lifting done then so that, when we DO open for everything, we can do approvals en masse without a lot of people impatiently waiting for staff to get to them in the queue.

Also, during this time in addition to playing mortals and getting a feeling for the grid and the setting, I imagine people will be working out their ties to other characters. We can probably have the sphere channels open for networking and the now standard RP rooms off the OOC room for backstory scenes and that sort of thing, and some general mass-collaboration between players and other players and players and staff.

I played one of the first batch of Changelings on HM when they opened, and despite there being a high degree of staff-side chaos with that which I do NOT want to emulate, there was also a lot of sphere-wide collaboration between everyone involved on pretty much every level that was fun. That many people adding their touches to the underlying setting made for a very interesting finished product and also a nice sense of community and investment from the players. Having fond memories of that, I’m hoping for something a bit along those lines with our game.

Aww!

Well, this is me! I still peek in to check mail on TR occasionally but I admit I am infrequent and not super motivated by that setting anymore. You can always PM me here.

PS Obligatory 'come play on Eldritch' thingie.

@Coin said:

@Derp said:

@Coin said:

@Derp Host it.

I lack any knowledge of how to do this thing.

Learn.

Alternatively, furiously TS someone who knows how.

... Are there elements to how you got @Thenomain on-board with helping make Eldritch that I don't know about? Just curious.

@Thenomain said:

Except you, Dart. Or D...something.

Dash.

The cool Mysterium mage from The Reach.

Silver Ladder.

You were awesome

And memorable apparently!

@Cobaltasaurus said:

He will pretty much chat code even when you don't want! Or are unsuspecting of the code!

Can confirm. Even if you know that he knows that you understand absolutely nothing that he's saying to you because it is esoteric MU* coder stuff, he will still cheerfully regale you. Sometimes I feel like the Skype version of telling your clueless golden retriever about your day at work.

@Arkandel said:

"secretly"
"stolen off"
"at work"

None of these words mean what @Eerie professes.

More relevant to this topic, I'm not even much of a gamer and I'm super excited about 360 games being backwards compatible for the One. Particularly if I can get the Nike game to work, since it was great but the old 360 Kinect could never see me that well in my living room. The One Kinect is much, much better.

@Derp said:

I mean, that totally might not be what's going on, mind you. It just... I dunno. Kind of seems weird to me, as a policy. Sphere caps on full supers to prevent ST burnout while not capping anything else seems to ring of the idea that everyone else is secondary.

This is absolutely not the case. In fact, I would say my most active, gung-ho player right now is playing a mostly-regular human. I adore her because she was the first and thus far only person to respond to my post offering to throw some plot at anyone who raised their hand, brought five people with her to the scene, including both a werewolf AND a demon, spun that scene off into a whole evening’s worth of RP for all of them and has submitted three separate jobs following up with what she wants to do and investigate next.

This is kind of my ideal for players on Eldritch. I feel like as soon as PRPs started to be the thing and staff as STs less so, staff across various MU*s convinced players that they ‘shouldn’t bother staff’ more than they absolutely have to, and I hate this. I want to be bothered. I want engagement. I want this sort of proactive player who wants to poke at the world and try things and investigate stuff and change things, and even better if she’s willing to drag other people into the mix along the way. Which... is why I said STing and not staffing, and why we need sphere caps.

We’ll see how it goes but we have deliberately tried to keep ‘admin’ work down to the absolute bare minimum. We’re not doing inventory systems. We will (soon, fate and @Thenomain willing) have players doing their own XP spends for the most part, with a few exceptions for stuff like Status that staff will still want to squint at a bit. I have plans to sort of crowdsource to our players a lot of stuff like building, some plot elements and STing, various other things, and our plan was always to have MU*-wide reviews every six months were we all get together and talk about what’s working and what’s not. Part of this is because I want to build a sense of community and investment among everyone so that it feels like ‘our’ game, but part of it is because @Coin and I love STing first and foremost, and we want to spend as much of our time as possible doing stuff related to stories, not WoD accounting.

So why cap Supernatural Templates and not humans and minor templates? Here are my two best, most honest answers:

Demand – We did a soft opening for like a month and we had a paltry few people interested in this, even after working out ways to roll their mortal and mortal+ characters eventually into the supernatural they were waiting to play. Meanwhile, most people continued to log on and chat in the OOC room. They were just not that many people interested in playing minor templates. If I logged on tonight and there were 40 mortals and mortal+ characters in the approval queue, I bet we’d cap everything. So far that hasn’t happened, and in fact most often this comes up in the context of ‘it’s the same amount of effort to staff for a wolfblood as a werewolf’, and the unspoken second half of that is ‘... so just let me play a werewolf because I don’t want to play a wolfblood’. And therein lies the difference, because I can thus far leave stigmatics uncapped and not be subsumed in a tide of apps, but if I did that with Demons I would be divining keys and interlocks until the end of June at the earliest. So it’s that, and...

It sucks to tell people to go away – I am very excited about the world that we’ve made and dying to see what people do in it. I also know that, just at this particular moment, there are a lot of people looking for a place to play they can get excited about and, while there are a lot of things in development, not a ton of them are available yet. Eventually they will be and I expect that the whole community will hit a nice equilibrium, but we’re the first of them open and here we are. I also know that nothing we have done here means a thing without players, and all the world building and STing and policies and code in the world mean jack unless you have players willing to really buy into things and who are excited and have some modicum of faith in the whole thing and want to tell stories with you. So even though I know that what we want to do is just simply not feasible with a game of 500 people, and that none of us want to run The Reach 2.0... it feels wrong to tell people ‘no, we don’t want you’ because people are what makes any MU* great.

All that being said, this is an experiment of sorts based on what we think will work, and who knows if it will! Like I think, in my naivety, that having readily available plot that is not dependent on who you know or what position you hold ICly will really foster a cooperative experience among everyone. I think that a lot of the bitter battles you see on MU*s that spill over into OOC are in part because there is not much happening and so people are fighting to be in a position to be the guy who gets to handle the tiny bit of plot that there is. In that situation, the reason that it turns OOC is because one player is actually going to win and the others are actually going to lose. So what I want for Eldritch is to see what happens when the guy who wins does get the fun plot... but so does the guy who loses. And the guy who is snickering at both of them and not even fighting this particular battle. When everyone can have access to plot and stories and interesting things happening to them, I have hopes it will mean that people can relax and enjoy whatever happens more, because from a fun standpoint, everyone is going to win.

But, again, this just will never work with a giant, sprawling game. It will only work with a medium sized community of players who see a return on their investment in what we're doing. So I don’t expect sphere caps to ever go away entirely, but I do hope that eventually there will be a lot more really good options of places to play and they will start to matter less because of that.

Edit to add: I also want to say our players have been incredible so far and have volunteered and built stuff and offered code and all kinds of help and been super supportive of what we want to do and each other, which is the best part. I feel really lucky we've gotten off to the start we have on the whole, despite a few glitches.