Best posts made by faraday

@surreality said in Earning stuff:

I understand that plenty of people think 'don't be a dick' or 'behave like an adult' are enough to cover all of that ground, but I simply do not agree, as definitions of unacceptable behavior and adult behavior vary widely enough that I believe these guidelines are nigh useless.

I respect your opinion and your right to be as detailed as you feel necessary on your games, but I disagree strongly that such guidelines are "nigh useless".

The "don't be a jerk" statement isn't trying to educate someone about what proper behavior looks like, it's setting expectations. It's just stating that if I think you're a jerk, you will be disciplined. It doesn't really matter whether you think you were a jerk, or whether Sally thought you were a jerk. What matters is whether I think you were a jerk.

"But that's not fair! How can we be expected to read your mind and know what you may or may not consider jerkish behavior?" someone might ask. But seriously, I think in 90% of the cases, people know. Acting like a decent human being isn't rocket science.

But because there is some gray area, it's important to enforce the policy as a decent human being yourself. You don't rake them over the coals over a first offense (unless it was particularly insane), you just set boundaries: "That wasn't acceptable, please don't do it again."

This the same way that house parties, restaurants and places of employment work. Nobody needs to tell you not to wreck the furniture or shout racial slurs at the other guests. On the flip side, you don't expect someone to jump down your throat for failing to realize that people take their shoes off at the door here. Common sense and courtesy go a long way on both sides.

So tying back to the topic at hand, I have zero problems with staff policies on "earning stuff" being vague if it boils down to a judgment call. The BSGU policy on earning IC medals was: "Staff decides all awards." The end. And sure, there were occasionally some grumblings like "How come Jane got a medal and I didn't?" but I don't think that would have been avoided even if I'd written a book on the awards guidelines. (Heck, it happens in RL and the army does have a book on the award guidelines.)

@bored said in MSB, SJW, and other acronyms:

@Tempest It's not a problem if the individual spaces are moderated per their own rules.

Yeah, the key there is consistent moderation. Everyone slips up or gets carried away now and again. That's just human nature. It's not as simple as "I want to flame you and not be flamed in return" as @Tempest seems to suggest. It's just that when you're in the midst of a heated discussion you don't always see the line. That's why we need moderators instead of just relying on "the community" to police things, because different members of the community will have different barometers for what's worthy of moderation. The moderators are the ones who are (theoretically) capable of enforcing a consistent line.

The other piece of it is community flagging. I confess I don't bother flagging often, because as @surreality pointed out - the only real consequence is that the whole thread gets shuffled into the hog pit and then I can't participate in the discussion any more. Until there are real consequences to breaking the rules that don't punish the rules-followers, there's not going to be a lot of buy-in. It's just going to be more slapfights.

@arkandel said in Earning stuff:

"Players want things which are rare and special. However if many possess them they are neither rare nor special."

I agree with that assessment but not with your low/middle/high spectrum. On any game you end up with things that people perceive as being limited/cool even if it wasn't something that you ever intended to generate competition. So "giving no one anything cool" I think is inherently impossible.

@botulism That's totally fair. Nothing says you have to cater to everyone. It can help, though, to make that clear in the welcome files to set expectations and avoid people wandering off in disappointment.

@coin said in Earning stuff:

But online play, in the massive games we run and play in, is a completely different beast, where you are not the protagonist--you are a protagonist amidst dozens of protagonists, and that spotlight istemporary and transitory at best.
The more people who get that, the better the hobby will be.

Except that it's perfectly fine to have it work the other way around. The more people realize that there is no singular right way to play these games, the better off this hobby will be.

On BSGU, the PCs were the badass heroes of the story. An ensemble of heroic protagonists. They were the ones going to space, blowing up the space slug, etc. and the plots were structured accordingly.

Games need to set expectations better so people know whether they're getting a game where they're the heroic protagonists or they're getting a game where they're the supporting characters in a wide-reaching story.

Then games need to set policies to support the kind of game they want it to be.

@bad-at-lurking Yeah. And I think FAE exacerbates that issue, because instead of concrete skills like "Athletics" or "Piloting" where it's pretty clear whether somebody knows something, you've got people using their Approaches in ways like "Well naturally I should be able to fly a shuttle, and I'm going to do so using my Careful stat". I see what they were going for, but it's just a very weird approach for me. Particularly for a MU environment where not everyone is on the same page and there's no GM readily available.

@coin said in Earning stuff:

You may have had good experiences with a BSG game, but as a whole, I just don't see that, haven't seen it, and especially haven't seen it last.

It's not just one BSG game. I can name a number of games that have functioned this way, with characters operating at a more epic scale of heroic adventure. I'm not saying every game does, can or should work this way. But to claim it's impossible is inaccurate, and to claim that the people wanting it have issues is slightly demeaning.

@zombiegenesis That's a good description. And I'm actually not saying it's a bad system at all - it's kind of neat. But it is very different from what MUSHers/TTRPGers are used to, so it just takes a different mentality for resolving conflicts.

@coin said in Earning stuff:

True, but in MMOs they've also completely gotten rid of the "special factor". Your level 60 Archmage with the Wand of Watoomb's Mom isn't the only level 60 Archmage with the Wand of Watoomb's Mom, to the point where you start to wonder how many wands Watoomb's Mom had, or at least how many moms Watoomb had.

I don't disagree, but I think it's not a black-and-white question of "everybody's special" or "nobody's special". You can have a mix, where it's like you're special in the quests "Yay you saved the world from the Big Bad" and special in rewards "Woohoo you got the Wand of Watoomb's Mom" and still inherently not be special because the guy across the bar just did the exact same thing. Maybe it's more of an illusion of special? I dunno.

@arkandel said in Do we need staff?:

Can a roleplaying game be designed with little or even no staff necessary to run it?

Demonstrably so. I've been doing it for years.

@arkandel said in Do we need staff?:

For example what (if anything) prevented me from doing completely irrelevant things, going after other players just to be a dick, cause OOC drama or any of the other issues staff typically take care of in 'traditional' MU*?

This is why I think having a minimal staff is prudent. Players inevitably disagree or do dumb things (even good players sometimes) and somebody needs to keep the ship on course.

But there are ways around even that if you're bound and determined:

• Various games have explored having no apps at all, or community-approved apps, eliminating the need for an apps staff.
• Full-consent games put more onus on the players to work out their issues, so they generally require little-to-no staff oversight.
• MUDs/RPIs let the code do most/all of the arbitration, so you don't need as many humans to sort out the messes.

Each of these has pros/cons, of course. But the point is - it can be done.

@thenomain said in Earning stuff:

Tangent: I think Mushes I’ve seen have become a more like sandbox video games: Less about the story and more about the experience.

FWIW I haven't seen that. What I have seen though is that peoples' definition of "story" has shifted to include only a) Epic plot events, or b) Relationship RP (including platonic/familial relationships) with friends. What's fallen by the wayside is a lot of the random "let's hang around in the bar playing pool" or "let's sit in the park and chat about the monster we killed last week" scenes.

Personally I can't call that a bad thing, because I don't really have the patience for the latter any more either. I miss it in a sort of weird nostalgic way, but whenever I try to do one of those scenes these days it's not very fun.

And really, when you get right down to it, a+b constitutes, like, 90% of primetime TV airtime.

@bored said in Do we need staff?:

Even at the height of the BSG craze weren't there a couple drama GOMOs? So I'm curious which are the 'good' ones. It seems like you'll have to engage in the same exercise @Ganymede is, ie picking out particular games not the genres/systems.

All games have some degree of drama. I've had to discipline or boot a handful of people through the years from my various games, but I consider those examples of problem individuals not problem games or genres. By and large, people on games I've been on have gotten along pretty well.

The thing that all of these games have in common, though, is not genre but the way they approach player conflict. They have either been:

• Expressly cooperative, where players are on the same team versus a greater evil (TGG, Babylon 5 for the most part, the various Battlestar games, The Fall).
• Low conflict, where you kinda have to go out of your way to be at direct odds against other PCs (Sweetwater, Martian Dreams), or
• Full consent, where players are forced to cooperate OOCly or end up in a stalemate (Maddock and some other historical games).

I think a lot of this is just basic human nature. When you pit people against each other, you're going to see more inter-personal conflict and need more refereeing than when you make them work together. Especially when they're strangers on the internet - many of whom are entirely too invested in their PCs as their personal avatars.

ETA: And some games just have crazy staff (e.g. that Serenity place). I mean, when the person at the top is toxic, what can you expect. That's not the genre's fault.

@thenomain said in Earning stuff:

Way back when, people logged in to write.

I have no idea what you're getting at. Writing has always been a part of MUSHing, and always will be due to the fundamental nature of the medium. Primetime TV writers are writers too. The fact that MUSHers are more inclined to emulate those types of stories is not a bad thing IMHO - especially when you consider that the ongoing episodic nature of MU stories has more in common with a TV series than it does a movie or a book (both of which have a core "story" and a finite resolution).

I don't know if it counts as a "RPG System", but I find Storium's mechanic to be pretty interesting: You have a fixed number of Strength and Weakness cards that you can play on challenges.

What I like:

• Each card propels the challenge towards a conclusion that furthers the story in some (hopefully interesting) way. It's not just "Oh, you failed? You die."
• You're compelled to spend your Weakness cards eventually because you have a limited number of cards in your "hand" and they don't refresh until almost all of them are gone.

What I don't like, though:

• The challenge outcomes are railroaded into "weak", "neutral" or "strong" outcomes, so it's not as freeform as most MU situations.
• Cards are not rated, so you can't have two people with a "Strong" card and still have one of them be stronger than another.
• When your hand runs low, sometimes you're arbitrarily limited in how you can respond to situations. Like, you think this would be the perfect chance to show off your "Stubborn" weakness, but crap - you already played that card.

So it's not a perfect system, but I think aspects of it would be interesting to adopt to a MU game.

@ganymede said in Earning stuff:

But I don't think that those systems necessarily made the interaction meaningful. That was up to the players.

Yeah, I really fail to see how simply bribing people into doing more social RP makes the social RP any more interesting.

Most random pickup scenes follow a basic pattern: 3-5 people congregate in a random public location (bar, cafeteria, the park, town square, mess hall), sit around, and do small talk. The scene has no spark, as someone put it earlier. Unless the small talk leads to an argument or some dramatic revelation (which is rare), there's no tension, no drama, and no action. Finding ways to inject those things into random pickup scenes would be the way to make them more interesting, which I think in turn would increase peoples' willingness to actually do them.

@ganymede said in What RPG SYSTEM do you want to play on a Mu*?:

And, if that's the case, all that you really have to do is describe what a certain level in Dominate or Presence can allow a character to do and create a mechanical roll for it. Faraday's code does the second part very well, so all that matters is how well one does the first part.

I applaud the concept of making a "WoD Lite" for MUSHing, but FS3 is really probably not the right vehicle for it. It is scaled for mortal conflict, and once you go beyond the "best of human ability" level, the dice just get silly and your rating 20 vampire is really not much better than your rating 13 vampire. Plus it has zero concept of "powers" built in. Even if you went to the considerable trouble to add that, using powers to augment abilities (as many WoD powers work) again runs into the same dice issue as the 20/13 example. So I really just don't think the math works.

Genesys' traits system or Cortex's assets system both would probably model super powers better - and both are provided (in minimal form, at least) as AresMUSH plugins.

@thenomain said in Managing Player Expectations:

@faraday

I played Fallout 4 expecting a Fallout game. My expectation was they called it Fallout, but it ended up being a very different experience to the previous offerings and I felt kind of lied to.

You’re entitled to feel however you feel, obviously. But hypothetically if you were to go off on a cruel rant to the devs about how the game didn’t meet your expectations, I would say you were wrong. We can vote with our wallets (or in the case of MUs with our feet). There’s no call for raking creators over the coals because their vision was different than yours. Because at the end of the day, what defines “a Fallout game” or “a Star Wars movie” is for them to say, not for us to say. It is, in fact, their world/game/franchise.

@thenomain It wasn't mixing tenses.

@coin said in Flat/starting competency on MU*:

A big part of WoD and CoD and most games with XP in general is being able to advance, grow in power, etc.

I think most tabletop RPGs (and video game RPGs for that matter) are designed around this concept, so that's what people are most familiar with and generally expect.

There's a segment of the population that are perfectly happy without XP gain, as long as you let them make up the character they ultimately wanted right out of chargen. But there's another chunk for which the advancement is a large part of the enjoyment. If you flatten or cut the XP gain, you either need to substitute some alternate mechanism of advancement, or accept that a lot of those folks will get bored and leave.

@twinprince said in How to: make your poses less repetitive:

As to not having descs set and/or not wanting to read a desc... Something about the fact that the entire type of game is based solely on reading and writing really leaves me unsure how to fix someone... Not wanting to read.

I don't want to go off into a 'to desc or not to desc' tangent, but I prefer a more organic way of incorporating peoples' descriptions than a traditional static desc. I think this is also a nice way to shake up your poses, so it's on-topic here.

I mean, think about when's the last time you were reading a novel and it just paused in the middle to give you a paragraph-long dump of how the character looks. It just doesn't happen.

Instead you get these morsels doled out over time. So if you pose something like "Mary brushed her long red hair back behind her ear as she took a seat at the bar..."or "Mary removed her leather jacket and draped it over the back of the chair as she sat..." - not only is it more interesting than "Mary sits at the bar" but it incorporates important details about her description. Then it doesn't matter so much whether someone read your @-desc.