Posts made by Ghost

Lately I've been considering maybe one day giving my hand at LARP again. Not WoD LARP, but the camping/drinking/Knights of Badassdom stuff. Ive been eyeballing a few Dystopia Rising zombie-LARP chapters, maybe even NERO, but can these things get as fucked up as some White Wolf LARPs get?

Talk me out of it?

My horror story:

There was a LARP where I live run by this guy who had rape fantasies. My SO and I actually kicked him out of our house once because he offered to run a tabletop game (No big deal, right?), but then during an IC party scene proceeded to make my SO and his wife make super hard Stamina rolls. Their both woke up in some back room with douchebags with camcorders date raping them. My wife (and I) quickly went what the fuck and the GMs wife got cross with us for ruining the game by our chars trying to beat up/prosecute the date rapers. His wife was down with it. We were apparently in the wrong. Boot to ass. No more tabletop with them.

Cut to a year later. Same GM is running a Sabbat LARP. His Archbishop enjoys punishment for lesser ranking Sabbat who fail with (surprise!) rape with a super large, purple dildo. GM bought a super large dildo and brought it to the LARP and when character was punished (usually female) he would take them away from the group and describe the punishment. NOW QUEUE 16 YEAR OLD FEMALE PLAYER WHO IS A MOLESTATION SURVIVOR. Her character fails, and when her punishment scene comes along, she ends up bawling, in tears, has to leave the game. She was unaware that this went on at the game. I didn't know this either, for the record, as I didn't play in this game.

It turns into a huge Facebook shitstorm. GM, his wife, etc took the camp of "Hey, she signed a release and it's an adult game. We aren't responsible. She knew the risks." Where the other 50% of the players (note, 50%, maybe 20 players total, so this should give you an idea whose LARP hobby was more important than defending a wounded bird) took the "This is fucked up and you should apologize, and this should never happen again." angle.

I stepped in and politely informed the GM that showing a sexual toy and/or describing a sex act to a minor is a felony and falls under the category of statutory rape, and suggested the teenage girl file a complaint with the authorities.

This prompted the GM to kick 3-4 players (including teen) out of the game so he could continue to rape characters in peace. The teenager never filed charges because she didn't want to give up on LARPing. Last I heard, a few years later, the teenager had become an adult and was buddy-buddy with GM and wife.

@Groth said:

@Misadventure said:

Penny dreadful's character dynamics had involved backstories that mattered, and little contact with others who knew any of what was going on. The viewers learned as the characters did, or slower. This dynamic does not work on a MU*.

I don't think any of us here are talking about the specific setting of Penny Dreadful but rather a setting in the style of Penny Dreadful.

Agreed. Not the TV show in particular, but the Penny Dreadfuls. The little, cheap rag horror serials that take place in turn of the century settings. Lovecraft. The Ripper. Werewolves of London.

Think Sin City of Horror, stories told in a slightly noir/dreadful setting.

@Groth said:

@Coin said:

@Arkandel said:

@Groth I'll help run it, but I won't head it.

You have a bad habit of getting people to hypothesize and get into an idea and then going, "but I'm not gonna be in charge!"

We've seen what happens to people who headstaff.

Truefax. Most staffers with bright eyes for their new shiny game are like...

...and then four months after opening are like...

@Arkandel said:

@Ghost Wait, are we talking about a non WoD game using the CoD rules? I'm not clear on that.

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to confuse things. I'm not talking about any game in particular. I was just saying that if a Penny Dreadful type game were created on MUspace, I'd prefer it be non-WoD.

@ZombieGenesis Seconded (Thirded?) A Penny-Dreadful, gaslamp Gothic non-WoD horror would be amazing

@bored said:

@Ghost

It's unfortunately almost a rule of MU design that if you split your playerbase your game will die or at least suffer horribly until you integrate them. It's not that the idea doesn't sound cool, but it's just one of those things with the size of the hobby etc. Really the only way to combat it is doing the thing you said not to (alts), and even then it tends not to work.

I have often had to come to terms with the realization that what I or a small group of mushers would think to be cool would never work for the larger mush community as a whole.

For the most part, it seems to me mushers want to choose where they show up on the grid and to be accessible to the OOC beau they made a character for, and that splitting up the grid on an isolationist game like that might lead to players leaving because it would be unfair that their former pop star can't immediately shag her former Marine she met at USO. Then again, with my kind of thinking, that above "make characters for each other" concept would be against the spirit of a survival mush where you can't choose which group you get taken in by, so fuckem? I dunno.

Some ideas are just better left to tabletop.

I'm willing to bet that isolated zombie game idea, especially with high mortality and the right rpers, could take in maybe 20-30 unique IPs

@faraday oh, I probably should have mentioned with my 5-6 grids idea, that the grids were disconnected from one another. 5-6 groups of survivors within 150-200 miles from each other and no way to "wander" from grid to grid without staff involvement.

@Arkandel said:

@Ghost said:

Assign a GM/ST to each region, so each region has their own disconnected stories, different housing, and different wants/needs that could cause them to unite or fight amongst each other as they saw fit.

Generally speaking, systems which depend on an abundance of STs don't prosper.

I think that's true in terms of WoD/Firan type games when you're dealing with hundreds of players who all want personalized special plots, weird powers and their uses, and oddly political stuff. In a Zombie setting, however, you'd just need a few good GMs with something to say and an eye for tv-grade linear storytelling. They wouldn't have to do much more than throw zombies/raiders, arbitrate life/death, let the PCS fight or fuck, and then provide direction (including locations and dangers). I think for a zombie setting, my idea could work.

Then STAFF would gather regularly, discuss where each group is going, maybe throw in a unified threat (raiders, horde of Walkers, tornado) and go from there.

In xWoD with spheres of 100+ players and two, three alts per player? Yeah, fuck that. Overload happens.

I think you need to ask yourself two questions. ONE: How many characters can reasonably fit into the setting and TWO: Does this setting/population reasonably allow for a large player base. If the setting calls for a smaller cast, then invite-only or limiting the number of available players might be the answer for you. Get 7-10 active, productive roleplayers and keep a roster of people you want to invite in the event that players drop off or start to idle.

One idea I had for a zombie-genre mush was to have 5-6 grids within, say, 200 miles of each other. Have staff randomly roll (d6!) and drop their character in one of the zones. Like Walking Dead, you could have Alexandria/Prison/etc styled factions who could choose to work together or not. Assign a GM/ST to each region, so each region has their own disconnected stories, different housing, and different wants/needs that could cause them to unite or fight amongst each other as they saw fit. Oh, and NO ALTS. It will keep the rp pools a bit more pure. Sure, someone could decide to leave or be exiled from a faction and after the harrowing experience of wandering away from old faction, another d6 could be rolled (reroll if prior camp is rolled) and voila!, a new face arrives.

Sometimes tiny communities and factions make sense

@faraday said:

@Ganymede said:

@Derp and I had a discussion as to whether a non-inclusive clique with no influence and no desire for it is actually a detriment to a game. While we ultimately concluded that the influence would be minimal or nil, I asserted that such a group would also be pointless and, therefore, undesirable.

Well I said that it can be detrimental. It depends on what else is available on the game (to draw in new folks) and how influential the members of the clique are. For instance, if the small-town Sheriff, an important char, only ever RPs with Bob and Suzy, that might be a problem.

As for undesirable, it depends on what the point of your game is. If you build it so that players can log in and have fun, and those players are logging in and having fun - groovy.

Also, I rarely see a clique that never RPs with anyone else, so even if they mostly just RP with each other, there's still some net positive for the game as a whole.

I don't mind a clique that only RPs with each other so long as that clique isn't in some way kind of taking over the game. Again with the SerenityMush references, but this applies. The "Space Pirate" faction on SerenityMush was hideously out of canon. They also had staff support and were funneled all of the best weapons and armor from staff, and there was a lot of rules oversight. They got away with a lot of bullshit. So they became this highly exclusive faction that took on Sprogs, who were newbie characters in the faction that were PK-free bitch kids, cannon fodder, and packmules. People would join as sprogs because there was RP to be had, but there was a lot of risk/price to put on the line for joining the exclusive faction who got all of the special bonuses. Eventually, this Pirate Faction took over the game and were a standing stalemate element to every plot, could bully whoever they wanted to IC. When, due to RL issues between Mal, Inara, and Frost, the faction splintered and became stale, a lot of players were displaced.

If I were running a game I would owe it to the game to keep an eye on cliques. Within cliques can come a lot of under the table OOC communication and coordination on IC things, which is both meta-gamey and puts some risks on game balance. If the clique becomes popular, then it could become a force to be reckoned with and flip that switch from net positive to how do I get this under control without ending up on WORA very quickly.

@Luna said:

I've often felt unwanted. The worst thing though is 'I love RPing with you, but so and so hates you and will get super dramatic about it so I can't' Ph cool. Bad behavior rewarded. Awesome.

Ohfuck I sympathize so much. I've been there. So you're in a slightly or very abusive RP friendship/weird thing and thus I need to take the bullet?

Fuck that.

To each their own, but on games filled with fragile egos and low self esteem cases with limited real-world social skills, I don't think one should rule out the empathetic, wishy-washy approach. You'd be amazed at how well some people will respond to you if you merely give them the impression you give a fuck what they think.

I don't mean this to sound sociopathic, but really I mean it to say that people are more inclined to work well and peacefully if they feel like the other side gives a fuck.

@Ganymede said:

@Ghost

I wish I had more time with Webb.

I was happy, at the end of The Reach, being Clarice. Nothing like a Winter-Mouse-Cop-Alcoholic to make people double-take.

Sounds so much fun. I'm sorry I missed rping with your character.

@VulgarKitten Yeah, I dug what Webb was up to. Always thought it was a fucking shame so many players were trying to game the game on an OOC level. I should have forwarded the pages to staff.

@Sovereign

I know some really great Hunter roleplayers. The one I have in mind treated Changelings, ICly, like he would treat rape/sexual assault victims who could theoretically live in symbiosis with mortals without causing undue damage to their lives. He treated Lings like smaller potatoes compared to vampires because the Lings aren't really the issue, the Gentry are, and to work with these poor, victimized humans to better protect mortals from the horrors of the Gentry is far more productive than killing them simply for being different.

But itse that kind of thinking that makes for a good character, IMO. It's not the what, but the delivery, that makes the spheres mesh well together.

@Arkandel I tend to get a lot of OOC pages about moving the scene away from the current venue the moment a police character arrives. Webb, was it? There was a character who was a cop/hunter with a large dog. I'd be in scenes with changelings, werewolves, and shifters, and Webb would walk into the coffee house or whatever with his dog to BUY COFFEE AND DONUTS and the players would freak the fuck out in pages like he was the fun police. Me? I roleplayed with the guy, because even though my character knew he was an IC cop, was doing nothing illegal and it's okay to be sociable with cops.

"Hey what's up? Have a safe night, officer..."

But in pages I got a lot of meta-gamey nonsense from players wanting to scram because they knew OOCly he was a hunter and a cop, and were theorizing that he cherrypicked and joined the scene specifically to find supernatural characters to hunt.

Duh. He's a cop/hunter. His whole CONCEPT is to do this, not that YOUR characters know this...

But, topically, this kind of stuff also tends to make players feel unwanted, especially when they have no clue that behind the scenes, players are adapting their roleplay based on the super-type information gleamed through +finger or wikipage.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I base any GoT TT game I run in the North, Free Cities, or Dorne because of this.

@Cirno I roleplay to have my character's life fucked with. If I wanted a story where everything my character wants happens how my character wants, then I'll sit alone in the dark and write it myself. I depend on other players/staff to complicate my shit and fuck with my PC's chi.

The trouble with LordsAndLadies mushes is this: If things happen, then they're bad, bad things that affect everyone.

Sure, there's beheading/punishing criminals and the occasional raider/highwayman to ride down, but those will be NPCs. What about the PCs? You've got a bunch of lords, ladies, men-at-arms, soldiers, shitbags, handmaidens, etc, and they're ALL from different houses. So the logical idea is to have marriages, stack them against each other, cause some drama, poison some wine, have a few rapes, set a few fires, run down some smallfolk with horses, right? Because that's what the nobles in GoT do. They troll each other at the expense of their people. They meddle. They cause problems. They marry male and female members of household to people who very well may end up abusing them for politics.

It's like Pro Wrestling with swords, lances, and seduction.

But the general RPer doesn't want to have their sexy little relationships or noble lives fucked with, so the drama tends to be like a 6th grade dance where most of the boys and girls are on opposite sides of the gymnasium daring each other to ask this girl or this boy to dance, but nothing really happens, and they leave it to staff to create drama for them to all participate with each other in as a team. The players that try to start shit mostly get avoided and viewed as dangerous to RP with, and most of the players either won't cause drama unless they're sure they will get away with it OR don't do it to avoid OOCSplosion.

So tourneys. And Banquets. And scenes in the yard. And sex.

The noble houses circle each other like two teenaged boys in a fight, too afraid to commit to throwing a punch, until the teacher across the hall yells WHATS GOING ON OUT THERE and everyone scatters to rumor-douchebag about how one or the other kid was being a pussy.

@Sovereign I could get behind that. Tribes.

In "The Realms Lustful" thread, players of a GoT style LordsAndLadies game are currently arguing over what Lust means and whether it means people bone ICly.

They're your core player base.

You have been warned.