Posts made by Ghost

I dig that settlements WILL be destroyed. One thing I learned from another zombie game is that characters and the settings, like Walking Dead, should be impermanent and mobile. Make the in between zones deadly enough so that they appreciate the camp, but do what you can so that the camp doesn't become bogged down with "playing house".

Even pacifist, non-combat characters need to justify their survival, IMO. If the player believes they can hole up in a town and RP farming and forever be untouched...some players will definitely only take that option.

To be constructive and pull it all together, I don't think the focus of the conversation was to give examples of shitty players or situations (much less start arguing with each other), but the point was to discuss how to take a new game with an existing MU genre (L&L) and make it successful.

So, I think there are a lot of strong opinions about what sort of consent should be provided, and a lot of opinions on how to put the right roleplayers in the clutch IC positions. I think what we've learned is that a lot of these players have both good and bad experiences, and what ALL MUers are looking for is to recapture the good past experiences and to revisit the energy on when it was good.

In the end, I wish a lot of luck for your space Lords and Ladies game, and I think it's a genre people are excited for. If I were you, I'd comb this thread, or ask specific players, what they felt worked and didn't on any of the Lord's and Ladies games, and use that information to help drum up a game scheme that will be successful.

@Misadventure said:

When you think about having an effect, how big an effect to you hope for?

Honestly? I think about 1/3 of the time I've heard this, it has meant "I want the GM or the plot to be affected by changes of my own design, or I want to feel like my input is being accepted by the GM/staff. This tends to be a complaint I hear often, and whether said plot change idea is the best or worst ever, the player tends to feel as if the plot change is warranted and really wants it to be implemented.

However (I use HOWEVER at lot, don't I?), I find that MU and Tabletop(TT) tend to run the same trope when it comes to GM/ST railroading. You see, us story-writer types, when we envision a tabletop adventure, tend to think Beginning, Climax, Resolution, and when designing an adventure or a meta plot, we envision where we would like it to go, how we would like it to end, and some of the filler pieces that make the story and the plot exciting and make sense. So in MU and TT, I tend to see a lot of game plots and scenes where the general meaty bits of the story have already been authored; the players don't so much affect the outcome as they do help the GM deliver the end game she had in mind...

...and in that, I feel, many TT/MU players feel like they are supporting cast to the GMs story, where the static NPCs are the primary cast who initiate the major, over-arcing changes. From this point of storytelling, I feel a lot of players, definitely more than 1/3rd, are very perceptive to figuring out whether or not their characters are making any sort of dent into the GM/STs original vision.

@tce HEYYYYY RAMIRO HERE.

@bored You make a really good point here.Mall Cops (who presumably do not want a higher risk security job) do not occupy the same arena as Marine Force Recon. If the player isn't into the idea of risk or PC death or negative consequences for their character, then they shouldn't be involved in higher tier risk ICly. Period.

In my long years mushing, all too often I came across people that wanted to be IC leadership, or super awesome pilots, or super deadly assassins, but when it came time for the sense of risk and destruction they were so eager to inflict on other players or NPCs came to risk their own characters, a sudden avalanche of rules lawyering, OOC drama, and RL angst accompanied those episodes.

If I were making a Space Lords and Ladies game, or any game, I would definitely hold players of higher risk IC action/job/politics to non-consent for high risk rewards/failures. You cannot, cannot, allow players to gamble with monopololy money while other characters are gambling with hard currency. It breaks games.

EDIT: Also, to note, players that don't want to involve in combat, risky politics, or dangerous metaplot events like the big battles of Fifth World have got to understand that, when they choose to abstain from the high risk arena, by means of dramatic guidance alone, their characters are not central to the main story. Staff is infinitely less prone to write plots around characters who don't want to heavily affect, or be affected, by the central theme. These players have got to be honest with themselves. If you're playing a pacifist character who wants to maintain a horse stable and farm on a game whose main focus is intergalactic warfare, then your character really isn't important to the story the game itself is trying to tell as a whole. This character may be important to you and your friends, but you have GOT to understand that when it comes to furthering the metaplot, your character is simply NOT important to that major story piece. Choosing to not partake in that is your choice, and because staff isn't straying from the metaplot they're trying to manage to whip up sandbox pacifist horse stable plots doesn't mean you're less important, it just means that you chose to tell a different story than the game, staff, or plot had ever intended.

@faraday I've always found you to be a very fair and supportive RP partner, and I have always tried to share the stage. I think, sometimes, I've found that my attempt to share the stage has often left me feeling as if players were assuming I was taking a step back and letting them take point. Anyway, I'm digressing from the main topic, but I think fair minded people who wish to share the wealth are less common than we would hope.

@bored said:

And casual observation of the MSB-adjacent MUverse bears this out. If the overall desire for most people was to simply have their relationship RP and avoid at all costs anything that might threaten it, you wouldn't see the non-consent dominated WoD-playing population.

You mean...the non-consent WoD games where most people spend time in private rooms and only a certain population of players and their alts actively involve in dangerous plots?

Just because the WoD games are non-consent doesn't mean that a player can't make a character, focus on their relationship roleplay, never be at risk, and simply avoid the non-consent danger points because they're so busy in private rooms with their IC partner.

@Misadventure said:

I just want to get out what I have thought up for my character. I dislike being removed from play before that by something I had little to no interaction with. it MIGHT be possible to make players feel their actions have repercussions beyond their immediate RP, and thus understand the escalating states of tension and so on with effectively remote seeming RP.

Seriously though, players are not there to be someones extras.

Agreed. If my character dies, I want it to be in honest combat (where I knew the risks), or I want it to mean something. I have no want to have to restart a character or story because some other character/player arbitrarily felt it was a proper plot twist.

If it's a good plot twist, I may agree to it, but I have no wish to restart because my character was an excellent supporting actor death in another character's main character focus story.

@faraday said:

@Ghost said:

Some players will get uppity on an OOC level about it, but the ones that stay will be your good roleplayers who care about things like metaplot, art, and story over whether or not they're getting their super sekret quasi-cheating romance escape.

I think that's an gross mis-characterization. I am against involuntary character death, but it has nothing to do with romance. I care about metaplot, art, and story. But when I'm playing a MUSH, I'm writing my character's story.

I'm taking a little longer to write this so that I can word it correctly, because I really appreciate you and enjoy the time we've spent together. So, this isn't a kickback to you in any way, okay? I heart you gurl.

...but the MU game is not a story where one person's character is the protagonist. Each character is, effectively, a supporting cast member for every other character. In a self-penned story, this may be the case, but in an environment that is to be shared, when each player writes or feels as if their character in the MU is the main character in their story, then a FUCKOFF HUGE problem arises:

1. This is precisely why players often have complaints about attention, or other players getting more attention than them.
2. This is precisely why some larger scenes are a chaotic game of leap frog where 4-5 players all butt heads trying to make their character the source of the solution or the big damn hero.
3. There is a logical issue with multiple players roleplaying or feeling as if their character is the main character in their story on a shared environment, and that is that this means, technically, every other character is a secondary cast member in their story.

The "my character is the main character in my story" approach, I feel, works very well on smaller MUs with more closely knit buddies running and moderating the game. When you're friends with the staff and it's a smaller population, you can afford to turn your character's long term story or endgame into a communal effort. On larger MUs with open invitations, it is all too easy for people to become lost in terms of importance and have to constantly feel as if they're jockeying for attention so that staff takes stock in their character and story.

It's just a big mess, but I agree with Seraphim on this one.

Other players are rarely, if ever, concerned at all about whether or not other players feel like their characters are main characters, because many are so damned busy focusing on their own characters. So, how do you write a character, your character, as the main character in your story, while extending time and energy to make your character a supporting cast member in someone else's story where their character is the main character?

!=

Another 2¢ from me:

I don't care what the game is or what setting it is, and I'm doing my best to not sound like some bitter Grampa type when I say this, but I've come to realize that a grand majority of the MU habit is roleplaying relationship simulation. My main advice for anyone starting a game idea is to understand this. Most of your players will focus on some form of relationship arc storyline as their personal baseline, and unless they want to roleplay a character death, will choose IC actions based on their OOC RP desires to avoid having to rekindle or reset their relationship roleplay. A large number of your players will be making IC relationship plans via pages, come into chargen with an already established plan to have relationship RP with another player's character, or will put the game onto the back burner if they fail to find relationship roleplay and are getting it on another game. Because of this, most players will avoid consenting to death, assassination plots, or risk of character loss unless it is predetermined that the outcome will allow them to keep their characters. These players do NOT want to lose their RP with their IC/OOC paramours, because if their character dies and their new character hooks up with the widow, players will call foul.

So...you have to reinvent the wheel. The laser beam focus on relationship roleplay is NOT because players don't have anything to do. This is inaccurate. The focus is cultural, and it travels from game to game. So...the only answer is to not only remove consent as a factor (99% of all players will never ever ever give consent to risk char death to opposed dice rolls), but to incentivize the war of houses, assassinations, and to provide some kind of "Hey, death happens and it's unfortunate, but it's good plot fodder and makes for good, dramatic stories" explanation. Some players will get uppity on an OOC level about it, but the ones that stay will be your good roleplayers who care about things like metaplot, art, and story over whether or not they're getting their super sekret quasi-cheating romance escape.

...and then you have to accept that trying to force or incentivize players to get involved and that risking their characters is fair (because let's be fair, the asshole that wants to bang everything and never consents to character death while wading into an army of 2000 bad guys is not only an asshole, but is forcing an unrealistic OOC demand "or I'll take my ball home and complain on WORA" edge to a game), will likely result in no one playing the game. Why? Because this hobby has become so predominantly about roleplaying with the player and NOT the character.

10¢, I suppose.

@Kanye-Qwest Long and short? If it has Lords/ladies/nobility/succession/marriage games...be it sci-fi or fantasy...its considered by slang to be a Lords and Ladies game. It doesn't matter if it's hardcore realistic, lots of TS, magic, dragons, or mechabeasts, if the baseline tropes are Lords, Ladies, Houses, Noble succession, it is a Lords and Ladies game.

A Dune game would be Lords and Ladies just as much as a GoT game, regardless of how serious or whimsical the rp is.

@Kanye-Qwest Think Game of Thrones. Lordly Houses, their children, knights, and house retainers, and their alliances/Wars/politics for or against other lordly houses. Usually set to the backdrop of some war where X number of houses unite to fight y number of other houses.

However, the term Lords and Ladies also implies the style of roleplay: Make a Lord from "House A" that is attractive and popular, meet a Lady from "House B" who is attractive and popular, and get her heels into the air a lot.

@Apos I've been on a number of LaL games and I've been privy to a bunch of side-pages from players about how staff hold them back or will get involved with plot if it doesn't change their character without approval. Perhaps it's the group of people I came across as opposed to yours, but a lot of people I knew on the LaL circuit were very focused in their "LordA-and-LadyB" story. For them, THAT was the story on the game; the story they were the star of, and they guarded those relationship arcs so vehemently to the point of roleplaying them in secret, lest anyone tell them ICly that they couldn't take place.

@Misadventure not to be contrarian, because I love your opinions, but in my experience if you require players to jump through hoops to get their TS, they will simply do it anyway, or vacate for a place that won't make them justify their TS.

You see, it is my opinion that on most MUs, TS>Plot for most players. Ive seen hundreds of players quit plot, or games altogether, due to a lack of TS. So the trick is convincing people to partake in RP and plot alongside their usage of mushing as a terrycloth monkey that is providing them sexy relationship time not present in RL. To convince some players to set aside their hunt for attention and/or sympathetic romantic roleplay, you've got to make it worth their while, and most people are NOT lacking complication in their lives...which is why TS wins.

Like I said, I don't mean to be a troll, I just feel that it's better to understand the hobby's player base before exhausting onesself on hectic coding endeavors.

Wasn't Realms Adventurous only open like...6 months in the first place?

I'd hate to be the naysayer (I'm not trolling, I swear), but this is an awful lot of detail and work to go through for a player base of LordsAndLadies players whose main interest (as it usually is on all of their games) is to find and maintain TS.

Sure, you might capture 3-5 players who are really into the theme and space combat, but dozens of LaL games have shown that the plot falls by the wayside in favor of TS, safe (non character threatening) roleplay usually involving romance, and a metric fuuuuuuckton of ball/coffee/tea/nightclub scenes.

You can come up with an amazing idea, systems, theme, combat, maybe even a new codebase, but at the end of the day, the MU community rarely changes. Every new game will draw in the same crowd (plus or minus the people who decide they can't join the game because of some ancient feud against a staffer or another player) to take a peek. The LaL frequent flyers that are on every other LaL game will come to take a peek, and their characters will fall under the same boundaries of behavior that they partook in on their other two-dozen LaL characters: To seek and maintain TS, safe roleplay, and a metric fuuuuuuuckton of nightclub/tea/ball/banquet scenes.

You're better off using an already existing codebase (FS3), speed-creating a wiki, and hoping that whatever detail you've put into the theme enraptures at least ten people enough to participate in the core metallic while your 20+ other players continue to do the same shit they do on every other LaL game.

In short? Don't overdo it. It's not worth the effort given the shelf life of most MUs nowadays.

Had a random thought this morning. Is it just me or is it surprising we don't have more MUs focusing on the larger, more popular anime IPs out there? We see the occasional Robotech game, which I'm personally a fan of, but Attack on Titan came to mind.

Attack on Titan seems like the kind of FS3/Greatest Generation high mortality MuFodder that the BSG/TGG crowd would crackfiend on, and given that AoT merchandise is everywhere, I'm just kind of surprised to see this hasn't been done yet.

There are so many breeds and brands of anime in varying grades of quality. I think there's a Naruto themed game around, but has anyone seen anyone try AoT, Knights of Sidonia, Sword Art Online, or any of the other big name anime titles in MU form?

@Thenomain yeah I am trying to open a poll but it's failing.