Best posts made by faraday

@faraday said in Spirit Lake: An Original Modern Fantasy Game:

But giving staff grief for making a tough call to try to make a quality game? That's not cool.

Making a complaint based on a decision is not 'giving staff grief.'

Umm... it kinda is? Especially when said complaint gets dragged across several pages of posts. And especially when it's in direct contradiction of the "Rules of Engagement" for the Ads section.

This is not the place to criticise or attack either those games or their runners.

@arkandel said in Ideal Scene Length?:

I think I like meet and greets especially if they are organic and players invest in them.

Meet&greets are important for building out your character's relationship circle, but here's one case where I think shorter is better. Because if people feel the need to keep the scene going until midnight, you either run out of things to talk about, or you get this decidedly inorganic thing where now you're over-sharing all kinds of crap about your character. Nobody(*) does that.

There's this stigma in MUSHing that once you enter a scene you're committed until you have some kind of RL excuse to stop playing. Otherwise it's taken as some kind of personal rejection. I think our scenes would be better if we would just let them end when it makes sense.

(*) Actually people do, and my mom seems to be a magnet for them, but that's a separate issue.

I've felt the same. MUSHing is a fast-paced, time-intensive hobby; no two ways about it. I've taken breaks from the hobby before, because I just didn't have the right blocks of time at the right times of day to RP effectively.

It was my hope that the Ares scene system would enable more organic "slow RP" as @Seraphim73 describes. Not because I want to supplant the "live" MUSH scenes we're all used to, but as an alternative for folks like us who don't want to leave MUSHing but just need a little more flexibility in our RP. Some people use Google Docs for the same. As Seraphim mentioned, it still leaves you out of big events and stuff, which can be frustrating, but it's something?

I've also played around with Storium RP. The pace is slow - sometimes maddeningly slow - and the quality is very hit-or-miss depending on the players. But it's much more friendly to wacky schedules and limited time.

@Ominous said in How do you like things GMed?:

The Quantum Ogre is one of the oldest discussions in the OSR. I lean on the "never" side of illusionism, but, if you truly can pull it off and somehow guarantee that the players are never able to discover the illusionism, have at it. I don't trust myself to not screw it up.

Yeah, similarly - if you can consistently entertain groups of 10-12 PCs just by "winging it" and never pre-ordaining anything, more power to you! I can't. I have no philosophical objection to the Quantum Ogre. If they go to the forest, they get to fight an ogre and have fun. If they go to the plains, they get to fight an ogre and have fun. (Presuming that fighting an ogre is fun in the first place). Seems like a win-win to me.

Some flexibility is still required though. To use the example from one of your articles:

Bandits to the east - we go west! ack, bandits here too!

That's railroading, and the players will pick up on it pretty quick. When the players are going to great effort to do (or avoid) something, I think that good GMs will give the players something for their efforts.

But to quote a different part of the article:

If they enter your rioting city, and decide to leave, let them get the hell out of there if they wish. . .

I mean that's fine, but at the same time... players can't go out of their way to avoid the plots handed to them and still expect to be entertained.

"The Starbucks just exploded!"
"OK we leave and call 911."
"Um. OK. Cool. Thanks for coming. Event over."

@Ganymede said in How do you like things GMed?:

Also, she was the medic, and we kept on getting fucking shot apart.

Lol, she was also the medic with the worst luck, who got shot more than anyone.

But I think @Ghost is right - if you're going to put your own char into a scene you're running, you've got to be careful that you don't hog the limelight. Nobody wants to come to a scene just to be window-dressing. That doesn't mean you can't ever do anything cool; but you do have to share the coolness with others.

I think that same philosophy applies to plots too. If the PCs are just there to be window-dressing in whatever story you're trying to force down their throats, that's not fun. But if you present them with a cool challenge and give them a chance to shine and do something cool, most folks can have fun even if the outcome of the challenge was pre-ordained. The journey often matters more than the destination.

@Tinuviel said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

Have neither of you ever used a job system before? It's an anonymous job, not a shout into the void.

I've written three different job systems and none of them have included any kind of "anonymous" job because (as Sunny also pointed out), you can't keep it anonymous from the wizards. I guess you're talking about a game where there are non-wiz staff handling complaints and players aren't worried about the wizards somehow accessing the "anonymous" data, but I've never seen such a setup in decades of MUSHing.

Even if the job itself were anonymous, I have no clue how you'd keep all the details anonymous. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure things out once you start including specific conversations.

I agree with the folks above that if you need to resort to page-blocking someone, there's a problem and I would prefer to know about it as staff.

However, I also agree with @TiredEwok that I think a fair number of issues can be solved just by players. There are genuine abusers and creepsters in the hobby, to be sure, but there are also quite a few needy folks who just get carried away, blending IC/OOC to an unhealthy degree and not even realizing it until somebody holds up a hand and checks them.

We're all adults here, and can take responsibility for enforcing our own boundaries. It's when you do that and someone still bothers you that I, as staff, want to be notified.

I can't even keep track of @Ganymede's examples here, lol.

To me it's very simple.

If someone is being a creepster to you, and you don't report them, how can you expect staff to do anything about it?

If someone is being a creepster to someone else, and you report them but the 'someone else' won't corroborate the report, then IMHO it's not really fair to accuse staff of doing nothing as long as they made a good faith effort to investigate and monitor the situation.

If everyone is going to throw up their hands and say "Well he wasn't banned after one complaint, why even bother?" That is not my problem.

@Kanye-Qwest said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where reaching out to a player to say "Hey we heard you are being a dick. Knock it off" was ever that clear cut and simple?
... Unless you see a clear cut behavior that is not acceptable, you have to realize there are at least 3 sides to every story. At least.

Yes, this. There are some maliciously abusive creepers to be sure, but I think in a lot of cases the people involved don't actually realize that what they're doing is being a dick. Like you see sometimes in workplace harassment cases where it's like: "What? I just touched her arm 72 times - what's the big deal?" Unless you can confront them with specific things they need to do/not do, "I heard you were being a creep" is just not going to be effective. It's sad but I think it's true.

@Three-Eyed-Crow said in How To Treat Your Players Right:

Things that were public and involved multiple other people, just not staff at that exact moment. That Guy spun that stuff into 'oh I was just having fun and also I apologized and also what was the harm?' when it got to staff via other reports but the logs and my particular 'this fucker is a fucker' interpretation of the situation would've been a hell of a lot different.

I can verify that reports like this matter to me. In fact, they were a significant factor in the banning case I mentioned awhile back because it was clear that Bob had a pattern of inappropriate behavior that a number of people found troubling.

It's one thing to hear whispers of "Bob is harassing Susie and Jane" without corroboration, but when Bob is also getting reported by 7 different people (with specific examples cited) for inappropriate stuff he's been saying OOC and on channel, that colors the situation greatly.

I don't think most players actually want authenticity. Authenticity in many historical settings means you're probably going to have to play an uneducated, superstitious, oppressed person with a short lifespan and limited social and geographic mobility.

"Want to go on an adventure anybody? We'll probably starve, get lost, get eaten, or die of some horrible disease along the way. But hey - it'll be fun! Anyone? No?"

I think what interests people is the more romanticized view of specific elements of history - the freedom of the wild frontier, the genteel lords and ladies, the chivalrous knights, etc.

@TiredEwok said in SerenityMUSH - Discussion:

Was a thing on most comic games I RPed on. Was a thing on Star Wars Mush, albeit not quite as bad. It's just how it is. People want to RP with others whose characters have a common goal, I guess.

Sure, but it comes down to how small your teams are. In a Firefly type setting you're talking crews of 4-6 generally. That's way different from a game where your "teams" are The Rebel Alliance, or Everyone at Xavier's X-Men School, or All BSG Viper Pilots or The Gangrel Clan. The more reasons you give people to interact, the more opportunities for RP there will be. The more siloed you make people, the more impenetrable your cliques become.

@egg Of course there are no guarantees (which is why a lot of Mu players stick to folks who are known quantities). I’m not saying you’re wrong to be bummed about it, but I do disagree that it’s an unreasonable amount of work to find RP. Pitch a scene on channel and take your chances. If nobody’s biting on a repeated basis during “prime time” hours, that could be a sign of an unhealthy game, or perhaps something for you to work on with your play style or character to make it easier to hook in others.

@Tinuviel said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

The former is easier to work with, given that sometimes we don't really get to decide when we're available, the latter is saner but not as malleable as sometimes we need.

I am always reluctant to be pinned down to a specific time, because I'm generally spacey about time and meetings (see the ADHD thread) and because my RL is kind of chaotically unpredictable. But I'm always happy to maintain a "dance card" of people I owe scenes to, and will ping them when we're both on next to see if they're up for it.

That's also partly why I made the Ares scene system work the way it did. Not everyone can multi-scene effectively, but for those who can it's nice to not have to make fake clone alts or whatever just to do it.

I've had +wantrp or +rpok tools on prior games and, in my experience, almost nobody ever used them. The RP Requests channel worked the best for connecting people. With Ares, I think it works even better because you can see prior requests easily on the web chat (or channel recall if you're using the client) so you can see that @Lisse24 was looking for RP twenty minutes ago and might still be.

I'm not opposed to adding a "looking for RP" flag/list if a bunch of folks want it, I just haven't done it because past experience tells me it's not a good solution to this problem.

ETA: However, I did envision the scene system being used for this end.

scene/start Somewhere in Westeros=open
scene/summary Looking for RP - maybe down by the dragons? I'm flexible

That shows up both on the web scenes list, the in-game +where, and the in-game scenes list. I don't really know how to advertise any better than that, but I'm all ears if somebody comes up with something.

@Lotherio said in Incentives for RP:

My question is more, must everything be XP oriented incentive wise or are there other incentives that could work that are less, well, gamey to me. @Tinuviel made a great comment, it takes more work and XP is easier to hand out.

I dislike handing out XP for this kind of thing, because it creates a power imbalance between characters for OOC reasons that I don't really think should exist. FS3 games have Luck Points for a reward system. It gives folks a slight edge without making them overpowered.

I think it's a fine line to tread, though, between making these super-enticing rewards that people will jump to get but then throw game balance out of whack, or more modest rewards that might not provide the motivation you desire.

@Pyrephox said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

It would be really awesome to be able to delete unshared scenes, though. My few false starts just hang out there, forever, and I haaaaaaaate it.

Oh, you know what - I stand corrected. You could at one point do this, but then I got concerned that someone might delete an unshared scene before the other players got around to downloading the log or whatnot. So I turned it off. Maybe I'll make it so you could do it if you're the only scene participant or something. I'll look into it.

I've been in the leadership of a volunteer organization in RL, and I think you find a lot of the same issues that we face on MUSHes. Someone either has a volunteer mentality or they don't. Incentives just don't work very well, unless they're super-enticing. (like $$ in the real world)

I think the RPG realm, stuff that makes your character badass is inherently super-enticing, which is why XP-based or trinket-based systems do work well. Unfortunately, they are fraught with abuse, imbalance, and an inherent unfairness in rewarding those with more time on their hands so now you have a class of haves and have-nots.

The alternate currencies require some system in which to use them. On my BSG games it was mostly +combat. Earn some luck points, get some more hero moments. If you've got some kind of action point economy, that can work too. But if you're running a mostly cooperative, story-driven game, your opportunities for making such a thing useful is fairly limited, and thus the alternate currency is not going to be very enticing. It's kind of nice for the people who were going to do it anyway, but it's not likely to actually motivate people who weren't already inclined to do the thing.

@Seraphim73 said in Incentives for RP:

Because yes, everyone is here for RP, because MUSHes are RP games, but not everyone is here to spread plot hooks and welcome new players onto the grid and generally support the actions of others. Many players feel that's burdensome, so if you want it, you incentivize it.

I think at this point I'm mostly in the "get off my lawn" phase of MUSH running. If I need to bribe you to get involved in plots, or be welcoming to new players, or support the others, then why are you even here? I'm just not inclined to cater to those people any more.

@Auspice - @Ninjakitten is right, though, that it doesn't show up in the active scenes list or active scene pages. That's just an oversight, which I can fix in the next patch. If folks want to be able to see it on private scenes they're participating in, I can add that too.

@Florida-Man said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

I only log in to play, so I don't consider this expectation unreasonable.

Logging in only to play is certainly not unreasonable. That's your choice. Just as someone can join a baseball team, attend each game/practice faithfully, never speak to another soul on the team outside of game-related conversation, and then go home. There's nothing wrong with that, but expecting everyone else to do it too is unreasonable. Communities socialize. Like it or not, MUSHes are communities. It's not just about the game.

I think it's an arbitrary distinction because the phrase "NPC" is kind of goofy, inconsistently used, and unclear when you're talking about MUSHes.

In a TTRPG there's a clear definition. There are players and there's a singular GM. PCs are characters controlled by the players, and NPCs are characters controlled by the singular GM. Even if your GM is running a pet NPC kinda like a PC (we've probably all seen that at some point), he's still an NPC by the very definition of the rules.

But on a MUSH, you now have a whole bunch of GMs. And when they're not GM-ing, they're often engaging with the game like a regular player would. The original definition just doesn't fit any more.

Then we have the character-bit angle. Some games use "PC" to refer to anybody with an @name-d character object, and "NPC" to refer to "extras" who are just emitted or entered into a combat system.

Despite all that, I still use the term NPC myself, but I wish we had a better one. Personally I use NPC for "recurring guest-star" type characters who are in the world but not part of the main cast, as it were.