A MU client that detected the type of MU you were on and correctly determined the commands for most ordinary actions and made them into buttons you could click (while still allowing you to enter the command directly if desired) would probably be awesome. It'd turn the learning-to-function-in-MUSH experience from a 'what the fuck do I do at the DOS prompt?! Tell me! Ffffff!!!' experience into a learning-hotkey-combos-for-a-GUI sort of experience.
What @tinuviel said.
Do I expect anybody to RP with everybody? No.
Do I think anybody has an obligation to play with everybody? No.
Do I expect you to ignore your friends to RP with rando when your time is limited? No.
Do I think RPing exclusively with four other people is cool? No. I think it's equivalent to showing up at the pot luck with four sandwiches to hand to your friends. If it's a sandboxy game, okay, its maybe more like a park where people are meant to do that, but probably you're using plates and napkins and drinking from the host's margarita pitcher.
Do I think this should not be allowed? I'd say it's up to the host, seeing as some games are built as venues for it, and on large games where it's not what many people do it's an invisible non-issue.
@faraday said in The Desired Experience:
But that's a very different argument than saying I'm "responsible" for it.
Probably a differing value of 'responsible'. "It's your job," responsible? No. "Having a measure of control" responsible, yes. People's fun does, in fact, depend on others looping them in. Not having the time, energy, or desire to do that is legitimate, but 'tis still true.
@Derp said:
Some of the suggestions made just seem like adding features simply for the sake of adding features, even if they don't actually improve upon anything. Sort of like this idea of buttons for all the commands. What does that accomplish that your welcome screen on a mush can't? 'Hi player, we assume you're new, here's what you need to get started.'
Huh? It accomplishes the difference between this:
And this:
The top one is better software, the bottom one the largely preferred software. No doubt this is in part because the instructions on the top one, like the welcome screen of a MUSH, are soon scrolled away and you've got to memorize instead of just sort of peer around the window and poke things until you find the command you want. Or the one you used last time and forgot, dammit.
And indeed, I'd have buttons for the to-room RP stuff. Or, well, an input box that that let you toggle between say, pose, emit, or raw-to-MU. Other stuff in drop-downs that you can bring up or turn off. Everything ought to tell you what the actual command is, same way a lot of software will display the hotkeys for commands next to the command's dropdown.
I've been playing these games, across a pretty good variety of codebases, for some twenty years. Yet I still can find ones where I simply cannot be arsed to check out the game because I don't know the command lines for simple shit, like reading their damn bb. I already know what a MU is, and I already know that I like them, yet I cannot be arsed. This is probably why new users are dragged in by existing users; they can only be arsed when a personal friend hypes the games to them. It's simply too much work to just check it out for the heck of it. Bunch of buttons to poke? Less work.
I am pretty sure that users, mostly, sort of like exploring by clicking buttons to see what can be done, but they don't like reading documentation, taking tutorials, or memorizing command lines.
@faraday said in The Desired Experience:
This just literally makes no sense to me. If Gany consistently logs onto my game and plays with their four friends and only their four friends, they're still playing my game.
But they're not. They are playing on your game. Or rather, at your game venue. But they are playing their game. Nobody else gets to play. They are showing up at your pot luck, availing themselves of your tables and napkins and comfy heated rooms, using your water and toilet paper, drinking out of your margarita pitcher, and insulting your other guests by replying to "Hey, that looks good, can I have some?" with "Nope, I only have enough for just us," and "Want some of the potato salad I brought?" with "Naw, I'm too full from eatin' this delicious sandwich that you can never try."
Also, my experience with this is that it really looks as if the people who can "only bring four" are bringing four to a group where three out of the four, if not all of them, are doing the same, and they are having a feast. If it really would and truly just ruin your fun to make sliders instead of foot-longs from time to time, welll.
@derp Cool beans, and I can think of other ways to practice that, all of which can reasonably occur off-camera and don't depend on me being in the reindeer games.
@derp said in The Desired Experience:
Why should vampires, or anyone else, expect more access?
Because Vampire is supposedly a game where the win friends and influence people element is important, and specific MUs often advertise that this is what the faction play is focused on. You can't lick asses that aren't there.
@greenflashlight Hmm. You forget the pretty that's to please oneself.
@Cobaltasaurus
I was Tichy there. And remember Grey but not the others.
@lotherio said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I still remember folks harping on someone here for saying Lego in a Battlestar Galactica game - basically making fun of someone wanting to have fun and not using a theme appropriate equivalent.
Haha. One mildly distracting thing about that show was that several household objects of the same model as ones I own(ed) appeared. A radio receiver, a dog's dish.
If that's not enough, everybody starts having auditory hallucinations of Bob Dylan, for pity's sake.
I hate it when people make fucking videos to explain things that should be written down. I read several times faster than people speak and find them an infuriating waste of time even when I actually want all the information and am not simply being annoyed because I can't skim to the relevant bits.
I think the original text advert could do with an update but is sufficient to the job and answers the questions you want me to answer in a video, and that you didn't read it. Which is fine. However, neither, "I hate this theme, make an advert that tells me how this theme is not like this theme," nor "make a youtube video advert" is good advice, nor would they be if the text advert were gibberish.
Also, since you don't like GoT and think that explaining how the game is different from something it's supposed to be like will make it more appealing it's pretty clear that it's not the game for you. Doesn't seem like your advice is gonna be all that relevant to making it appeal to people who actually find a GoT game appealing.
TV shows.
It's odd to me that we don't see Generic Television Drama MU. It's a crime drama, with both The Sopranos and Sons of Anarchy types. It's a police-procedural, with NYPD Blue and Monk and Hannibal elements all possible. It's a medical drama, Chicago Med and House. Your lawyer character is in Better Call Saul or is it Boston Legal?
@faraday said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I mean... given that it takes an entire writer's room to generate that level of plotting for 6-10 characters on a weekly basis,
It doesn't, really. They generate a whole screenplay and then some. A GM generates a plot-pitch and then ad-libs the thing with the 'actors.' Also, a satisfying little MU one-shot where your PC is there when an NPC robs the liquor store is about as much story content as the little pre-title-credits opening sequence on a teevee show, but is four hours of MUSH entertainment and probably a happy two week's worth of staff-run action for those characters who did more than watch.
@pyrephox said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):
I think something like this could really use a spotlight-focused metacurrency.
Yes, yes, yes.
I think many games could. Another way to do it would be to give people points -- Abelard and Brigid spotted the ocelot and devised a trap for it, and Camille tried to scare the ocelot away from the trap without A and B seeing her. They all get three star points. Darius, who was passing by, saw it all but kept Camille's secret, and gets one. On staff version of WHO and in jobs lists, character names are colour-coded by proportion of stars/votes. Many votes, few stars and GMs know at a glance that the character's active but under-spotlit.
@betternow Yeah. Really, it doesn't strike me as more GM-intensive than any other GM-intensive sort of theme. It's not an wind-em-up-let-em-go sort of thing like Soap Opera and a lot of Lords and Ladies games, but it doesn't seem more daunting than other multi-faction MUs.
And yeah, PRP. It might be easier to get people to do them, since you could simply lift a scenario from any prime-time-drama matching the faction and probably nobody would notice or care.
I would guess it would be less likely to have that PRP discouraging factor of not being sure you're familiar enough with the game-world.
With @Fortunae here. I don't like absolutely ginormous ones 'cause I get lost, but yes, the immersion, the RPing through the world, exploring, finding places that suggest lines of RP that I might not have thought of, etc.
I like it. Builders would have to control the length of the short-descs, not a problem.
@Creepy said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:
I'm still not sold that a background, even in short form, is necessary to anyone except possibly a player who likes to have their char's story all mapped out before they hit the grid.
I need it. It's 'Game of Thrones' and a great many PCs are related to one another in various ways and I can't approve two eldest daughters, or other such conflicts. I also have had to reject an elf and a princess of Normandy.
I hate bgs, but can't think of another way to cover this that wouldn't suck.
@Nausicaa said in Making a MU* of your own:
You can subscribe to every 'this is how to do it best' and still fail.
You can ignore almost all of them and still do okay, too, in my experience.
Also that bit where they do have flaws, but the flaws are the player's, and the player gets totally pissed when other characters respond as if these flaws are, in fact, flaws.
@Arkandel said:
...we are oddly enough running games with more rigid rules than multi-million dollar productions.
Is that weird?
Weird? Just silly. It's probably part about jealousy ("Waaahh, /her/ vampire got to get knocked up! I wanted to do that!") and the idea of "fairness" making GMs think that then they might have to repeat the thing. There's also, mm, that same reason folks don't approve the 'twinky' 19 year old double-PhDs even when they could be played well and that particular app looks like it would be. There will be a knee-jerk reaction about how awful and corny and shark-jumpy it is. Heh. On GoB, somebody bitched about how this 'wizard' character is just sooooo wrong and out of theme, with bitching player failing to interact with wizard enough to realize that he's not a wizard, he's a charlatan. And GoB tends to have less of that sort of bitchery than most games. I expect staff find that sort of bitching unpleasant and try to avoid it happening, even when they think they're not gonna let it control them. Saying, "This storyline is not as dumb as you think it is, investigate it or STFU," probably doesn't help much.
Also, there were magic toe-rings.