@FiranSurvivor said in Fanbase entitlement:
Comparing an entitled player on a MU* to a fan of a TV show is apples and oranges.
Indeed. Unless the game is utter fucking crap and undeserving of the name of 'role playing game' then players have, and are owed, a level of creative control.
Is this a case where 'fantasy escapist' is used to mean 'Mary Sue'?
@thesuntsar You can have a chatty NPC set the tone for them. You're all riding out to the wizard's tower and your NPC bard sings about the hedgehog and gets them all to play truth-or-dare.
You can make special effort to provide little opportunities for PCs to show their mettle in some way before the big bad shows, so they have a clearer interest in cooperating and negotiating with one another.
As a long-term thing, you can use The Voltron McGuffin but MU players tend to play close to the chest, so you may have to contrive reasons they must reveal that they've got part of it.
Edited to explain that the Voltron McGuffin is any multi-part wonderful thingie that the PCs have parts of or must cooperate to build. Abelard's walking stick of +2 bashing people on the head, Brigid's wonderful length of string that ties itself 'round what she wants in other people's pockets, Camille's pointy rock of making people you stab with a pointy rock bleed to death, Darius's gem of really good vision, put them together and they magically turn into the greatbow Bloodhoney, the only thing that can kill Ohmygodzerka, now all they need to do is not miss...
@arkandel said in The ethics of IC romance, TS, etc:
what if the choice that takes a PC mostly off the table is OOC? For instance if you stop being active on my PC's spouse to play an alt with Theno's PC. Do I have the moral high ground to get pissed off?
Moral? Eeeh.
Is it likely that you'll be upset? Obviously. Imagine we meet at the gaming store for table-top. You stop showing up for our game, but I see you across the room, playing with Theno at another table. I was enjoying our game, you dropped it because you enjoy playing with Theno more than with me. I am going to have feels about that.
@faraday Spot on.
Haha, I still want to do a 'The Magicians' MU, and that would play with this kinda thing, since part of the theme (at least in the first novel) was that feel when you're the brightest thing in your HS and go to a university where you are distinctly not, and have to reconcile with being the House Red of Genius. (It's really wine and will give you a real headache, but it's nothing to write home about.)
If it's for a MUSH, just make it look sorta like a flow-chart, with boxes and lines.
@ghost said in [How can we incentivize IC failure?](/post
So with that in mind I think that IC failure would be much easier for the MU community if the pace was a bit faster.
You've got it.
I would say it's maybe not so much about pace, but opportunity, which pace is part of.
People generally want to see their PCs do cool things, which usually means succeeding. Most people don't really want to never fail, as the removal of risk takes some fun out of things. But when failure comes with the wondering how long it will be before you get another chance, or knowing that it'll be ages, the desire to meet that RP goal and do the cool thing has more urgency.
I don't think it's actually all that common for GMs to actively fudge things so a favourite gets to succeed. Favourites just get more opportunities, and more often ones catered to their abilities. It can be self-fulfilling; favourite players are more fun for GMs 'cause they take failures well and happily turn them into more RP, but because they're favourites they know that botch won't be the last important thing they get to do for three months and that they've a good chance of success next time. Make it a mighty chore and a long wait for Abelard to get to do a scene where he robs a vending machine and watch him overreact when he fails, even though there's nothing at stake.
I imagine it's much more common to actively fudge to have somebody fail when they've gone after a plot hook meant for somebody else, or have found a solution the GM hadn't considered which would close things prematurely. Sometimes this is necessary, nobody's GM-creativity is always on to make fun-for-all from every and any eventuality. But it's also the favouritism I've heard the most bitter complaints about, and yeah. It's no bloody fun to have been trying for weeks to investigate the ocelot and get nothing, then see the NPCs give everybody important information about the ocelot.
My take.
Player agency is paramount. To deny it takes away the element that I consider vital to making the game a fiction-generating game rather than a collaborative fiction project. If you're laying out plot-points and forcing characters to reach them, then you are not doing the work of a game-master. You've made the outline for a novel/short story and are then, like Tom Sawyer getting those kids to whitewash the fence, conning other people into doing part of the work for you.
I have had fun getting together with people I RP with and deciding story outlines for events that were in our characters' personal histories, and then RPing them as flashbacks, but this was not the whole game. Nor was it the disingenuous act of a GM pretending that it's a game where I get to decide what my character does while actually refusing to allow me to have said character do what he wants.
So, timelines. Okay, if somebody showed up on GoB and wrote a character who had killing the king as a goal, I'd tell them, naw, we're really trying not to break the canon timeline. If somebody approved suddenly expressed the desire to kill the king, I would say, huh? Why? Like almost all 'canon' characters, and any who were more than a mentioned name, the king is an NPC who isn't present, and odds of any PC developing a real motivation to bump him off via IC events is pretty slim. I'm not gonna let somebody break the world just 'cause they feel like fucking with the world. But if I, or player GMs (whose plots I oversee and am thus responsible for the consequences of) lay down a line of events that leads a PC's personal story into a situation where said PC is gonna try to kill the king, it's my frickin' responsibility as a game-master to give that PC a fair shake at it. The little axiom goes, "Don't say no, determine difficulty." And by funder, if that player comes up with a really clever plan and rolls well, he can bloody well succeed and then. O my god the game will be on an alternate timeline. Though actually, yes, I wouldn't treat that the same as I do most other PC actions, where the difficulty I determine actually gives the players good odds of success, and the plan has to be, not necessarily clever, just not terribly bad. (Feels challenging, but you're likely to succeed, vs. actually bloody hard to pull off.)
Also suck:
The sixth failure in a row.
The failure that makes an ordinarily indifferent-appearing GM suddenly seem all eager. e.g. You've been waiting weeks for a response on your attempts to investigate the ocelot, which is what you want to play, but y'know, staff time is limited. In the meantime you botch a +urinate roll and the GM pounces on you to give you a scene where you get bladder stones, which is not what you want to play.
(7 can be easy to do accidentally as a GM, if you automate or run on auto when you sort/triage your docket.)
@tinuviel That explains the volunteers.
But the fact that the volunteers and the 'successful adopters' come from the same demographic almost certainly means that the vetting process is biased.
Now that I'm looking, there seem to be quite a few reports of racist discrimination against potential pet-adopters.
True to the base theme, yep. Situations where no matter what players do, they cannot change a course of events, never never never, in spite of the fact that the characters are creatures that could, conceivably, change events, that's not cool.
eg, I am running something set in San Francisco in 1906. The PCs cannot stop the earthquake from happening, because they are humans with the powers of humans in 1906 and it's just an earthquake, they can't even predict it. Okay. Same setting, but now I say that the earthquake is caused by the Eldrich Powers the PCs are fighting. They are superheroes, and can fight Eldrich Powers. I can set them up so that really, stopping the EPs is beyond them, but it is not okay for me to say hard-stop never-never-never.
@arkandel Yep.
I'm more-or-less against XP as a plot-reward on MUs, since getting to participate in a plot/event (especially one that's risky and meaningful and not a birthday party) is itself a reward more desirable than XP. The extra XP seems like, here, you did such a good job eating cake that you deserve an ice cream too. Some most intense 'no fair fucking favouritism' feels came from hearing somebody talk about how many "luck"/"karma" rescue-me-with-a-reroll-or-a-deus-ex-or-I'll-die points they'd spent when other (equally active with older or same-age PCs) players never had call to even consider using them.
McGuffins are under-used, and your point (very firmly) stands in that case, and also in the case of IC respect rewards.
Ability to take requests and intuitively provide potentially unspecified results.
This is a job qualification, listed on a call for applicants.
I see no reason why newbies should 'catch up.'
A MUSH can either have character advancement or balance, but not both.
Changing the World Takes Time, Gentle Readers
by Judith Martin, Nicholas Ivor Martin and Jacobina Martin
Miss Manners | August 4th, 2022
GENTLE READERS: There is a disturbing trend in Miss Manners' correspondence that she wishes to address, lest Gentle Readers give up hope of a more polite future. It concerns letters that begin:
-- "When did it become OK to ...?"
-- "Am I just being hopelessly old-fashioned or ...?"
-- "Am I being too sensitive when ...?"
What follows is an example of something that was never OK. Miss Manners' field is external behavior, not internal squirming, but her concern is the implication that the victim has, or should have, given up hope of improving society.
A fourth type of letter underscores the point: It seeks a polite response to a slight, real or imagined, that the Gentle Reader already answered with a taunting rejoinder, a rude gesture or worse.
Miss Manners does, on occasion, supply responses which, though faultlessly polite, cause an offender to explode in a burst of mortification and apology. But she more often counsels more subtle responses, which, even had the reader known them when the event occurred, would not have required a fire extinguisher.
This is because the goal is not to strike someone who struck you first -- the goal is not to get hit in the first place.
This should be apparent, as even Miss Manners' most caustic advice is too late to touch a driver who has long since sped away, a line-cutter who is off offending new people out of reach of the Gentle Reader, or everyone else who has long forgotten what happened at that date, luncheon, meeting or class reunion.
It takes time to improve the world -- or even, truth be known, one's friends and relations. This is not because there are no solutions to rude behavior or because one must either accept rudeness or be rude oneself. Nor is it because the solutions proposed do not work.
True, Miss Manners' approach does not always provide the instant gratification of smacking our fellow citizens under the guise of good manners. She realizes this runs counter to a world that is impatient when the package just ordered is not already at the door. What she advises used to be known as solving the problem, an activity that Miss Manners accepts is old-fashioned, even if it is the only one that ever worked.
And just because we do not see the offenders shrivel up in front of us does not mean we have not succeeded. Who knows but that, having been shown a better way, they have not spent a sleepless night repenting?
@eye8urcake oh god this. Can't get or keep their attention when you want it, can't get them to stop interrupting you when you don't.