@thatguythere said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:
I think I might be the only soap opera fan on the board, through that i have gotten used to re-casting of roles.
See, I view soap opera recasting as a necessary evil to ensure that storylines don’t get derailed just because an actor decided to move on. The MU equivalent to that is getting a new player for a character. There’s no need to change the PB in the process; it’s just a digital image.
@kanye-qwest said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:
@faraday Different strokes, I guess. To me as long as the pb is superficially similar, change away. But changing the in game stats that are visual signifiers needs a story reason.
That's fair. To me, somebody's height or eye color (which are stats) are way less important than their face (which is just a soft desc or PB). But like you said - different strokes.
@kanye-qwest said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:
because it's weird to have rpd with a character that is 5'5" and then suddenly a new player takes them and they want to be seven feet tall. It's immersion damaging.
Yes, but it's equally weird - as @Ganymede pointed out - to be RPing with somebody who's supposedly represented by Matt Damon and then suddenly a new player takes over and they're Brad Pitt. Even though they're both white guys of roughly the same height and age. That's also immersion-damaging.
Anyway, like I said - my personal philosophy is to not allow any immersion-damaging changes to characters once they've been played. But if you're going to allow one, I don't get why the other is somehow worse.
@roz - Sorry, yeah, I was talking about the first time somebody takes up a character. Once a roster has been played, then their PB/stats/etc. are fixed, as I mentioned before.
ETA: But that's just my personal philosophy. If you're going to allow a change of PB, I don't get why you wouldn't also allow a change of desc details like height/skin tone/etc. They go hand-in-hand in my mind.
@roz said in Rosters: To PB or Not To PB?:
you can play the game of "does this character resemble what's written on their sheet."
I really don't get this. Descs are the most malleable part of a character. Literally @desc me=Something completely different. If your system has coded demographics for skin tone and weight and whatnot that requires a stats tweak. But unless their appearance is somehow critical to the character, what difference does it make?
Especially in a sci-fi or fantasy setting - if you want to take my Emma Stone Caprican Viper jock and turn her into Lucy Liu - more power to you. (Of course, casting a modern-day Chinese-American Naval pilot whose ancestry is a critical point in their background as Emma Stone... that's just ignorant, as Hollywood is slowly learning).
It all comes down to how much about a roster char you allow players to tweak when taking them over, but personally descs and PBs are super-low on my list of things I'd care about.
From a player perspective, for me it doesn't really matter - I don't like rostered chars anyway. From a staff perspective, it's just a question of logistics. A roster character is supposed to be complete, approved, and ready to play - that's the whole point. On a game where PBs are required/expected, then the character isn't complete until they have one. I don't want to have to remember to chase people down after they've chosen a roster and hound them to select a PB (and empty log icons bother my OCD). So it's just a hassle if the roster PCs don't have a PB.
If they've never been played before, I really don't care if somebody wants to change it. But I don't allow PB switches for anyone - roster or OC - once they've been on the grid for a couple weeks. It's a continuity issue for me. I know different games have different views on continuity though so YMMV.
@seraphim73 said in What isn't CGen for?:
I would also add that I want to make sure that the most awesome parts of the character's story aren't behind them -- I want characters who do awesome things on grid, not brag about the awesome things they did in their background.
I really don't mind characters having done awesome things in their background. I more mind somebody who wants to do All The Awesome Things. They were a child-savant mathematician from a rich family who got their third degree black belt by age 12, were top student at the naval academy, top gun at flight school, and earned the medal of valor for saving a shuttle full of schoolchildren on their first mission out.
Yeah... no. (And I actually have seen backgrounds almost as bad as that.)
@seraphim73 said in What isn't CGen for?:
a BG is to make sure that the player understands the setting to some degree and has a character that fits into it
My favorite arguments for backgrounds... there was this one guy who was trying to play a literal Vampire on a straight-up historical Wild West MUSH. He did a lot of weird stuff before staff caught on to what he was doing.
Also on B5MUSH (which didn't have bgs in the early days), I was in this scene once with a Pak'ma'ra character, who was posing like there was more than one of him. Puzzled, I looked at his desc, and realized that he was described as having three bodies. I was all: "Dude, why are there three of you?" "Because the other four died." "..." He honestly thought that the Pak'ma'ra were some kind of symbiotic pack organism, heaven knows why.
If wacky BGs were a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence, you might be able to get away without them. But they really aren't. Many players come to games with honest misconceptions about the theme or really unsuitable character concepts.
@thatguythere said in What isn't CGen for?:
Pretty much every TT I have been in required a background anyway
Interesting - the TT games I've been in have never required backgrounds. So I can understand how it can be a foreign concept to some.
@seraphim73 said in What isn't CGen for?:
I don't think that justifications for high stats mean that characters can't take high stats,
Yeah, totally. I don't really care if you want your marine to be a virtuoso violinist due to some interesting quirk of their background (or a scientist, like @Ganymede's char). Mostly I'm just interested in continuity: Is there a sensible reason for it, or was it just "I didn't realize what the numbers meant".
@bad-at-lurking said in What isn't CGen for?:
Going from sheltered suburbanite, unsophisticated farm boy or crude thug to something more is a fun journey and there are only so many ways you can say, 'And then not a lot happened' before even the most disinterested staffer notices.
I think that's a good example of what chargen shouldn't do - judge people by arbitrary length requirements on backgrounds. If your character has nothing unusual/exceptional about them, then there's really not a lot to say. As app staff, I'm more interested in "what he doesn't know is that his dad was the famous jedi Anikan Skywalker..." than I am four paragraphs about his boring life as a moisture farmer living with his aunt and uncle.
For me, the primary reasons for CG review are to:
There are those who'd argue that the former can be handled on-grid, but by the time you identify the problem, damage has already been done. Dozens of players may be impacted and retcon may be needed. That's just awful. I think staff owes it to players to do a better job of preventing those headaches.
The second bullet is what I see the most issues with - even in a system as simple as FS3. "Why does your schoolteacher have Demolitions?" "Did you really mean to take Violin at virtuoso levels for your marine?" "You can't make it to Major with only 2 years of service." ... stuff like that. It's usually just a minor misunderstanding of the theme/system or something they forgot to mention in their background, but shaking that stuff out in advance saves RP issues down the road.
So while I respect that some players don't like to write backgrounds or flesh out their characters in advance, I view it as a necessary evil for keeping a game running smoothly.
But not everything needs to be carved in stone either. If three weeks in, somebody says: "Hey can I switch my hobby from basketweaving to chess?" then as long as they haven't done a lot of basketweaving scenes, I'll switch the points around. Similarly, you don't need to detail every year of their lives; there can be room for adding more information later, connections to other players, etc. Just don't try claiming post-chargen that oh-by-the-way you're also a millionaire and won the medal of honor.
@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.
@roz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
The benefit to headache quotient there is so wildly off, though. What great value would there be in having to spend the time policing it? Keep in mind the size of the playerbase. It's just so wildly not worth it for the trouble it would cause.
Sad but probably true.
@roz said in @Arx: Anonymous Messengers (Answered):
It was that the system encouraged a thoughtless brand of negativity...
I think that's it in a nutshell right there. If you build a tool that enables (encourages?) thoughtless negativity, then the result of players being thoughtlessly negative should hardly be surprising.
I'm not sure why anonymous messengers would fall into that same category though. There's a very real difference between a gossip-y/gripe-y condemn system and and a direct message system. Would a significant number of characters really be sending hate mail to the leader ICly via anonymous messenger? Because if not, then using the message system in that manner would be OOC abuse. It seems like that could be easily smacked down by staff (assuming the sends were tagged - for staff eyes only - with the sender's name).
@apos said in Managing Player Expectations:
And if everyone's reasonable, then either the staffer can decide it's something they'd like to see and expand it, or it's not something they'd want to see or aren't interested in and decline to add it to the game, and then a reasonable player also doesn't badger the staffer, and is polite and courteous in bringing it up, and the staffer is polite and courteous in hearing about it, even if 20 different people have also suggested it 20 times before and it's getting really, really old.
I think this is why we keep going off into the weeds. If everyone's reasonable, then having mismatched expectations is simply not an issue at all. A player might be mildly bummed or even leave the game if it's not what they expected. A staffer might sigh at having the same thing asked 27 times and having to patiently explain why that's not in their vision. Sure it's nice if you can avoid this by clearly stating expectations up front, but it is, quite simply, not a problem.
The problem, to me, is what @Arkandel said earlier: It's the people who aren't reasonable who take up the majority of the effort. I disagree that this is a clear-cut disciplinary issue, because it's usually not somebody screaming at you. More often, it's somebody who is making your admin life perpetually difficult because they just can't seem to reconcile their tenacious expectations of how the game "should be" with how the game actually is.
@thenomain said in Managing Player Expectations:
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.
@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
There is some real incentive for them, and future others, to go into the genre and work even if they need to turn social networks off since it pays the bills.
Absolutely true. I was merely commenting on the common sense of entitlement that drives the negative comments in the first place. I think that attitude is alarmingly pervasive these days.
@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
The curious part in this though is that while the primary motivation for these types is socialization they are acting in a decisively antisocial manner.
I don't think the primary motivation is socialization for all MUSHers. At least not on a general level. Many people play solely to play with their friends. Others are on the extreme anti-social side and view other players as nothing but props to enable or witness their rise to greatness. Cliques, creepers, glory-hogs, theme-breakers, and just plain-old rudeness... when you think about it, there's a crap-ton of anti-social behavior rampant in MUSHing. (And on the internet in general, though that's a separate-but-related issue.)
@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
I feel sometimes we take things for granted in our community, including the time and energy put forth by others for our entertainment. The world outside of MUSHdom isn't our oyster to harvest for our fun as we see fit, so why should a MU* be?
I agree with this 100% but I will point out that a lot of people take that same attitude even outside of MUSHing. I mean we've all seen people rip creators to shreds because a video game, TV show or movie wasn't to their liking. Not even because it was objectively bad, but because it wasn't what they thought it "should" have been.
@thenomain said in Earning stuff:
Social? I can't keep track of how many non-social scenes I've been in that were not the least bit interesting.
Sigh. I don't know how many times I have to clarify that I'm talking about random pickup social scenes with no direction and not all social scenes. But apparently the answer is at least one more.
@faraday said in Earning stuff:
@roz said in Earning stuff:
You're misunderstanding my point. Note that I didn't say the purpose needs to be about plot. ... I'm saying that, in good writing, every word has some sort of purpose. Sometimes that purpose is plot, but sometimes it's about character... but it's still relevant and interesting in some way. Good writing has a point.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say as well. One of my favorite scenes on BSGU was the pilots going to a karaoke bar during shore leave. ... In contrast, some of my least favorite scenes were random "let's stack some Cylon planes up and mow them down" combat missions, because they had no real point other than people turning up to pad their kill counts.
@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 Managing Player Expectations:
While I concur that it's not possible for a game to meet everyone's needs, I would posit that, with the right set-up and players, you can fill in some of those gaps. It's not going to happen all the time, but it can be done.
It's possible to get around the scheduling issue IF you have player STs willing to step up, but there's no guarantee of that. And the other issues I mentioned were more fundamental.
At the end of the day, I think players need to be responsible to either do something about it (e.g. get together to run plots themselves) or recognize that the game isn't a good fit for them. This idea that "I want to play Battlestar, so it's your duty to entertain me in the way I wish to be entertained and I'll rake you over the coals if you don't" is just entitled and unreasonable.
@arkandel said in Managing Player Expectations:
What I'd be curious to know though is what some of such players' expectations are to begin with.
@lotherio said in Managing Player Expectations:
I was kicked in the teeth for doing it and not having enough stuff for evening folks (and really, what the hell, why can't I run a day-centric game, every other game is evening-centric).
Replying to both of these together just to point out that I think, on the whole, players don't take enough responsibility for managing their own expectations.
Like, say you're an evening EST player and you're bummed that @lotherio is running mostly daytime plots. Or you're playing on a zombie game and are disappointed that staff doesn't want you to save the world by designing a zombie cure. Or you're on BSGU and are disappointed that your unit is focused on killing Cylons instead of researching how to hack them.
Players need to be more willing to realize that a game just isn't for them. All too often, they'll instead choose to stick around and whine endlessly about how the game isn't meeting their needs. That sort of attitude is toxic and discouraging. We need to get away from this idea that all games need to be everything for everyone. First off, it's impossible, but secondly, when it inevitably fails, all it does is discourage new game development.