Posts made by Eerie

@Glitch said:

This is like a solution in search of a problem. Who is unsatisfied with a first come, first served queue for entry into a sphere? Other policies are going to make this more or less appealing, such as giving priority to people with non-supers, etc, but it seems like an overly complex response to something that has yet to be proven an issue.

This is entirely possible, and is probably a reflection that I find all the answers to this unsatisfying in one way or another. But, I still really hate the idea of a 45 person, two-year old waiting list... so if we do end up going with simply 'first come, first served' I'd be inclined to only keep a 5-10 person waiting list and then we'll announce when we're ready to take more names in the future.

Any strong arguments for some other system of managing sphere caps?

@Arkandel

Define then hardcode an activity requirement.

So, this will be illustrative of my staffing philosophy probably, but I’m skeptical of MU* rules solving problems like this. Rules that clearly convey expectations and consequences on things where there’s no room for situational ambiguity are great, but my experience is that they do more to impose on good players than they do to curtail bad ones. I also think they can sometimes unnecessarily constrain staff and force them to behave in a matter contrary to their own judgment because ‘rules are rules’. To pluck an example out of the sky, let’s say we did this and imposed a ‘you must be active an hour a week’ rule or every two weeks or whatever. Players who know this, who are deliberately sitting on a spot because they might want it later, will easily get around this by standing in a room with their friend and going :grins “Hi” and the like every 15 minutes. Meanwhile, let’s say @Ganymede was also playing a demon and had a big legal hoosits at work and her parents were in town and various other things and she was going to be scarce for the next couple weeks. The player thumbing his nose at the intention of the rule is fine, but all of a sudden I’m constrained in making a judgment call about @Ganymede, who is a great player and has contributed to the sphere before and will doubtless again, because we have 'rules' and the person next on the waiting list is now pointing out that, according to the rules, she should be unapproved.

Beyond that, I’m highly skeptical of rules that attempt to resolve problems that haven’t even happened yet.† @Coin and I will both be involved in the Demon sphere, which, I agree, is where I am anticipating wait lists being the biggest issue, and I think we’ll have a good handle on what the players are doing and, honestly, I’d rather just talk to people if they don’t seem to be RPing and find out why.

@creepy

Open the flood gates, set no caps, and watch folks leave when they can't get an ST to run something specific to them. Eventually some equilibrium will be reached.

I feel pretty strongly against this, honestly. While ideally I would like to be able to help everyone have a good time, I recognize that we (staff) only have so much time and mental energy to devote to this, and I would rather help some people have a good time than everyone have a disappointing and frustrating time. For me it’s like having people over, and there is an unspoken social contract involved in this that you are going to go to some effort to make them comfortable and help them have fun while they’re visiting. If I invited fifty people over to my house and had a six pack of Pabst and a half a bag of corn chips, yes, a lot of them would eventually leave... but I would also be a super shitty host and I would feel bad, and probably should feel bad. Also a lot of the players who leave are probably great players who I’d like to play with, and having had a bad experience at the outset, they will probably now never come back, even when there is no waiting list, because most MU*ers, I have noted, are not really big on second chances. This is also bad for the game and for everyone who plays on it, players and staff, because we will miss out on their contributions because we deliberately didn't support them when they were willing to make them.

@Arkandel

(Also, open Geist )

Make them write a GMC version and we can talk about it! I’m pretty insistent about adding Changeling whenever it comes out. If this game is still a thing then and/or any of us are still alive.

† - Because this post isn't long enough already, I will add as an aside that I have this theory from when I staffed on HM as (I think) the very last staff storyteller there before they went 100% PRP: I think that it is natural for staff to want to make contributions to the game. I think that the fewer people on staff directly involved in RP/storytelling/plot, the more this tends to express itself as people anticipating problems and then making up rules to try and solve problems that haven't happened yet, which I think has lots of bad unintended consequences. My ideal goal would be to have at least 50% of the staff on the game involved in some way, even a little way, in stories and plots so that the staff focus stays on 'what can we do to make fun!?' rather than 'what can we do to prevent jerky behavior', because I think that last one is a far less productive timesink.

Much like XP systems, this is another area where I think there is probably not a ‘perfect’ answer that satisfies everyone, and we’re choosing between sides to err on more than anything else. We’ve been talking about this for a while, and I think there are obvious pros and cons to everything we came up with, hence our opening it up to the community for comments and suggestions. Obviously, all this is predicated on there being a huge demand to play any particular thing, or on our MU* at all, which is not a given. But for the sake of worst case scenarios, I’mma go with it here.

The ‘Pros’ of the waiting list model are that most people have an inherent sense that ‘first come, first served’ is fair, as a lot of things operate like this. The biggest Con for me with this, though, is it’s the complaints about a non-flat XP system taken to an even greater extreme – If you weren’t there at the start, then boo hoo too bad for you. Only in this case, you don’t even get to play at all. And while it sucks to have people jump the queue, this sucks too. Conversely, of course... it sucks to have people jump the queue. Which is the argument against the lottery.

@Thenomain was the one in our discussions who came up with what I thought was a good hybrid. At the risk of making it overly complex, I think after reading everyone’s thoughts I might refine it even a bit further. So @Coin had proposed keeping a waiting list of 5 people and filling spots from that as they open up. We could do it so that, when the queue is empty and it’s time to refresh the list, Slot 1 goes to the person who’s been waiting longest, straight up. Slot 2 is a random pull among the 25% of the people who’ve been waiting longest, 3 the 50% of the people who’ve waited longest, 4/75% and the last one among the entire pool. I think this still preserves the chance for new people to get involved, but also shows deference to the people who’ve been there the longest, as people the top 25% are in every draw and the newcomers only one. Then if we email or @mail or whatever you and don’t respond within X days, we’ll redraw I suppose.

@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.

@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.)

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?

@surreality said:

Part of me is sad for them that the collective news files being shared amongst most games these days more or less say: don't send explicit content to staff in jobs or even BGs.

You know, this is actually a good point. I don’t think that anyone involved is actually terrified of this sort of thing and that most/all of us agree that ‘adult content’ can actually be significant in a number of ways... I think the reason it shows up in blanket no-statements like that is more because its hard to articulate ‘Hey, use good judgment here and don’t just send me random terrible porn please’.

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.

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.

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.