Posts made by Groth

@le_mew said:

For the record, I'm open to any setting (as long as there is a compelling story or an inspiring historical period), but I'm not focused on any one over the other. Old west and roaring 20s seemed the most likely settings.

There are (and have been) WoD mushes, old and new, in almost ever real (or fictional) town in the United States. I'm far from an expert, but all the of the games that exist seem very much the same. How different is Maine from New Orleans? Or NYC from Las Angeles? shrug I like the idea of a historical WoD mux because it peppers a lil flavor to the WoD theme, but I realize I might be in the minority.

My understanding is that the problem you run into once you try to run a historical WoD game of non-trivial size is that the players are unwilling to research the relevant time period which forces you to either strictly theme police and give players homework or slowly watch the game feel like 21st century Maine anyhow.

Is there any great MUSH out there that isn't a ragequit game of some fashion or another? You don't usually go out and create a new game if you're happy with the previous ones.

@Nein said:

I've never felt that generating RP and being ICly active should be the yardstick by which leadership value is measured. Is it imporant? Absolutely. Should an egocentric petty tyrant and his lackeys remain in control of a group just because they produce RP? Hell no.

What would you use as the criteria for leadership positions?

@Nein said:

• ( 3, 6, 8 ) Characters decide their own groups' composition. Status-weighted votes determine ranks, positions and membership. To facilitate early game launches NPCs are set in place who can be voted out or competed with as normal by PCs. Conversely that means there are no protections for IC actions; highly ranked characters are bigger targets who may be eliminated in the same way as NPCs. Staff only audits this process to ensure OOC behavior remains civil and, to the extent it is possible for them to establish, that no OOC means or information were employed.

These two alone are going to hamstring your game in short order. All it will take is one charismatic or manipulative individual to gather to themselves enough willing accomplices to keep voting for them so they can get and maintain power for themselves. See: Communism. People CAN vote for sane leaders who are active but never underestimate those who can fake sanity. When power is available for anyone to grab, the people who probably shouldn't have it are going to be first in line. This is the same reason why having people volunteer themselves to be your staff is a bad idea, as most are going to stab you in the back later.

If a player/character manages to convince the other players/characters that he should be in charge, I don't see much of a problem with letting that player/character be in charge. What's important when it comes to an IC leader isn't sanity, it's that they generate RP for everyone in their relevant sphere.

@Arkandel said:

@ThatGuyThere said:

How would you deal with this hypothetical.
You refuse Player A's request for something that needed to be refused. You have the stated yes first policy. So Player A then starts a campaign of Staff is unfair. Said player points out how staff said yes to Thing B C D who were all near the line you have but not quite over it. Up until this point Player A has not shown to be a problem.

Someone in this thread made a point for clarity which was agreeable. To it I'd also add transparency is important.

"Guys, we made the ruling to refuse <X> in this case because $reasons, and when B C and D had a similar-looking we allowed it because $otherreasons. It is our believe $reasons and $otherreasons are sufficiently different to warrant a different approach." Then try to work with Player A to see if you can reach a compromise.

Look, eventually you'll run into players who are unreasonable. Just be sure you're not the kind of staff players run into who is rude and authoritative. So be polite and patient but firm and clear, then if it doesn't work even to the best of your ability and they refuse to take 'no' for an answer it's on them, not you.

Sometimes the reason for denying something is not something you want to air in public. When it comes to theme especially the reason for denying a player a particularly arcane concept is often that you don't trust that player to be able to play it, which is why another player can get the same concept approved by virtue of your confidence in that player to pull it off.

Trying to direct people away from concepts they are unable to convincingly play and direct them to things that suit them better is a subtle art. In Vampire for instance, there are very few players who can play an Elder that actually feels like an Elder.

@Coin said:

I don't really see this being very difficult to do in two lines. Writers do it all the time. They can even do it in one line. It's just that we're conditioned to expect more from our fellow roleplayers; we're used to everyone writing as if they were the protagonist. Sometimes I don't write characters from their point of view and instead write them as divorced from themselves as possible. I give a reaction, then an action, and that's it.

This is the writing style I try to use. Instead of writing that my character feels angry, I try to show that they're angry by their eyebrows narrowing, posture tensing etc. Idea being of trying to show the other player what my character is feeling rather then telling them.

Sometimes I find this tricky and can sit for a fair while trying to think of the appropriate reaction. Sometimes the appropriate reaction is also quite short and I feel bad about submitting a pose that's only a sentence long, so I sit there trying to think of something, anything to add to it.

On average, I'd say it takes me 1-2 minutes to notice the other person has posed, 2-4 minutes to think of the appropriate reaction and another 2-4 minutes to write the pose, ending up at between 5-10 minutes total. While I wish I would be faster and often feel bad about keeping people waiting, it seems most people atleast tell me they enjoy scening with me.

I ran into a guy on RFK once who really impressed me in terms of response time. His technique was rather different from mine, instead of waiting until the other person posed to write his own pose. He'd write his pose while waiting for the other person, then just modify it according to that the other persons pose was. This made him able to post reasonably sized poses after just 1-2 minutes. Obvious downside of that technique is that it won't work well if the other person does anything unexpected.

@Apos said:

As for severity, in my experience everyone worries about banning people that don't deserve it but that doesn't really happen so much as, 'Gosh, this person has been sending lewd pages to women. Let's warn him and oh good he says he understands and promises to stop' and a month later he is still there and 5 or 6 women have stopped logging in for mysterious reasons.

One of the problems is that people are very reluctant to tell staff they're being harassed, even when the harassment is very explicit. On RFK there were a number of problem players we dealt with that had apparently been harassing almost every female player in the game but noone had made any formal complaint, the only reason we found out was because we started asking players specifically about it.

Well, the people caught at CG are usually the people who are either just completely unable to play to theme or unable to read and write the English language (We had to tell two people with learning disabilities that our game was not for them). The creeps are usually caught later.

@faraday said:

@Lithium said:

My current idea re-chargen is to allow pretty much instant approval for 'side kick' level characters... It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

All I can say is I hope it works out better for you than it did for me

It wasn't skill points/powers that were the problem, it was people whose backgrounds were flat-out CRAZY, or who had a seriously deficient understanding of the theme. I don't see how those sorts of problems would be any better for sidekicks vs main chars.

Yes, you can let them hit the grid and expect players to sort the mess out, but my experience is that it seriously irritates the existing players. They didn't sign on for that nonsense and it can be really disruptive to RP. I see it as my job to insulate them from craziness as much as practical, and apps are an important step.

Theme is what I find to be the hardest part about MUSHing. The more mature a game is the more theme it has and the harder it is for most new players to ensure that their characters fit into the setting. One idea worth trying is to write primers for some of the more approachable concepts and try to direct new players in that direction.

@Ghost said:

History has shown that the more times a female player cries harassment, the more she is distanced from, even if the harassment was valid. I know plenty of female players who keep quiet about the people who are harassing them, as they have no want to seem like they're causing drama. If they can't game while dealing with it, they move on, or somehow find a way to tolerate it.

I think @Lithium is right. If we were really all going to get along and played fair, we would have found a way to do it by now.

It's easy enough to deal with obvious harassers, the ones who write all sorts of filth that's easy to log and send in to staff as proof. The situation that's commonly recurring and really hard to deal with is when the harasser is being deliberately manipulative against the victim in a way that's difficult to prove which leads to the victim becoming emotionally distraught and starts talking crap about the harasser all over the game.

That leaves the Staff of the game forced to deal with a situation where shitty rumors being spread and the game atmosphere being poisoned and the only obvious solution is to boot the victim because they're the one making everyone feel miserable.

@Ghost said:

Staff has a responsibility to protect their player base from predatory players, and the only way to do that is to establish expected guidelines of roleplay, conduct, and some realistic trigger rules.

I think that ultimately the best way to ensure this is not by having specific IC actions being prohibited but rather ensure that all players are on the same page when it comes to what is expected from the game. An asshole will always find a way to be an asshole within the letter of the rules.

If you want to have a game where people behave like adults, you need to be very proactive about making sure everyone knows the OOC standard of behaviour and vigilantly kick out those who are unwilling to behave.

@Pyrephox said:

Regarding staff and plot-first stuff:

I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better to have ST staff on time-limited appointments. For example, bringing people on for, say, three months at a time, specifically to run a plot or plots that will be wrapped up at that point. This works best, I'd suspect, in a setting that's open to having changes and variations in theme over time, and a game that's okay with some episodic things. But a) it would let STs have a discrete set of expectations to fulfill, and (b) the ability to exit stage left at the end so that they can concentrate on playing, avoid burnout, etc. It would also help /keep the game moving/, rather than risk the stagnation that you get with a core of burned-out ST staff. And you might find more people willing to sign on to be STs for a short term commitment rather than "until we get tired of you, or you learn to hate the game and avoid logging in". If it were me, I'd also want to put in a strict no-immediate-second-term rule. You MUST take at least one term off before reapplying, to keep a small number of perspectives from dominating, and as an anti-poop-socking measure.

In a world where you have countless of competent people volunteering to staff, anything is possible. The reality of the situation is that you usually have very few staff who are very overworked because most people just want to play and many who want to help with staffing shouldn't be allowed near a staff position.

@Apos said:

@Arkandel said:

Players have all the tools to deal with and isolate, bring IC consequences or anything else to these people. The game isn't consent-based by definition. Law enforcement PCs can imprison them, badasses can beat them up or kill them. The tools are there.

This is one interesting problem I've been having when deciding automation of combat in a MUSH, which is a logical continuation of reducing staff work as much as possible. Do you go with combat rounds being timed (which would allow the death of idle/afk characters), or do you go with combat being turn based, which allow players to potentially stall by refusing to advance combat to the next round? I was leaning towards the second with potential GM intervention and arbitration, since I thought it would be less disruptive than retcons (or permissiveness) of killing characters afk on the grid.

A player deliberately stalling is not something I've ever encountered in my life. I see no reason to ever put timed combat in a MUSH.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Okay, so.. really nitpicky but... please, PLEASE for the love of God... stop forcing people to have a desc before approval. Its a pointless barrier to RP. More people desc their character at the start of a scene than ever, and forcing a desc in the 11th hour just leads to shitty descing. Hell, I have a generic desc (9 times out of 10 it doesn't even remotely describe the character I'm playing) ready that I can slap on JUST to get past that bit of stupidity. You have a wiki, right? People will be making pages, and presumably, including pics? Cool, let them run free and desc the character on their own time.

The worst imo is when the chargen is programmed such that you have to write the desc before you have even decided on your stats yet.

@Ghost said:

The game isn't accepting force applications on this new game, yet the "Feature Characters" of Luke, Rey, and Kylo Ren are already in play. Looks like staff already done gobbled up some force slots.

"Feature Characters" are probably my biggest peeve with 'fanon' MU*. I'd rather them be NPC only or not show up at all rather then be played by favored players.

Because it was my staff name at RfK and I wanted to comment on something RfK related at the time.

I believe the sheer number of hours necessary to put in to actively run a great MUSH on a per player basis make it completely impossible for a P2P MUSH to function unless the players are all rich. I think you'd need subscriber costs north of $50 per month for it to make sense as a business.

Anyhow, more relevant to the OP. If you wanted to run a MUSH where every played had to pay to a charity, then I'd make the amount relatively low (Somewhere between $1-5 per month) and the purpose of it would be to ensure that everyone playing the game actually want to be there.

I don't know much about Rhost, but doesn't both Penn and Tiny come with built-in suspect flags which automatically log all the actions of the suspect?

@Apos said:

@Tez said:

So, no. I've staffed on games that support it -- looking at you, Firan -- but every game I've ever built hasn't needed it, and we haven't had it.

Yeah, the reasons for OOC spying that make sense are so rare that I haven't really come across them at all in practice, and I have a hard time seeing where you'd need it. In cases where I'd investigate abuse, I think the best compromise system I could come up with was having all pages be temporary and flushed at the end of the session, and players can voluntarily submit a copy of their own logs for review (but since it's server side, can't be doctored). Basically the same thing as report functions on MMOs.

I would never want to spy on players OOC actions, there are some things which can not be unseen, which can not be unread and many of those things happen where players quite reasonably think noone is looking.