Posts made by il-volpe

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.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah. Ever noticed how in TR's quiet room you can't roll dice? No thanks.

Nope, 'cause I never played there. Sure 'nuff if you spammed the quiet room with dice rolls, that'd make it not quiet. They don't have pdice there?

See, we have this 'idle lounge' or 'quiet room' for avoiding of sudden RP or random-chat or pestering.

@Bennie said:

• Maps. To me you can have a map of the game world without having every square inch of the map actually built.

Yes, but for some reason I want the grid to map to the map. There's areas on the map that don't have grid spaces, but if I make a diagram of the grid with the rooms as little boxes and the exits as lines, I want to be able to lay that diagram on the map and have it overlap more or less correctly, if I just adjust the sizes of the boxes and the lengths of the lines. My sad leetle brain does not 'feel' the reality of the game world if it doesn't work that way. (I remember one quite clever grid where neighborhoods of the city were all connected to a central spot, the +ic drop point, and all the parks and houses and shit to the central neighborhood room, so you could go anywhere from the drop point in two moves, and I never felt like I knew where the fuck I was, though I could easily look up the neighborhoods on a map of the real city.)

• Ownership. Ownership is so weird! What is it we're looking for, a place we can lock? Some places can't even be locked. Do you want a dark exit?? What is it you want? A place you can desc how you like? A place you can boss people and say, "Get out!"? I don't think people can even define why they want a personally owned space on a game. As far back as the 90s it was all about being able to idle and not get moved someplace off grid. But the ways individual games handle xp now, even that isn't relevant anymore. So what is it we're all looking for when we want to own a bunch of things? Can we even define it anymore?

Nobody on 'my' game has yet complained to me that they cannot actually own a grid room, they all belong to the builder, and they cannot redesc them without a +request containing the new desc, and they cannot lock them. Yet they want these spaces that are, ICly, privately owned. Why do they want them? My guess? They want them because their characters *have *them. They want them for the same reason I want the grid to map to what the world is actually supposed to look like. They want them because they reflect the game reality and thus make the imagination-work-experience-thing more vivid.

I don't see a grid as a group of sets alone. It also serves as a map of the game's setting. Admittedly, one needs a map of the grid, too, to help people navigate it, but the grid itself serves to place action. Which is why areas that are usually walk-through rooms can matter. (The house next door is on fire! isn't an event that makes sense when all the houses are linked to a single OOC hub, that sort of thing.)

Huge grids just get unweildy, but 'we don't need a bazillion businesses' sort of implies that you want to discourage players from owning businesses. By and large, a lot of PB businesses and housing don't end up getting RPed in, though the PCs may hope for it. They're not for using, they're for having.

@Arkandel said:

having a persistent 'visitable' world seems like a complete waste to me. Streets in particular,

I get a lot of imagination milage out of a grid. Where's this, relative to that, in the game world? What's in between? What's the neighborhood like? I dislike non-traditional grids that don't reflect the geography of the game world. I still prefer a +meet if I am on my way to RP, and exploring the non-traditional grid is less fun, and offers less information.

GoB is doing rather well in the creepy mysteries/backstabbing and betrayal/making power-grabs/hitting people with swords vs. weddings ratio, but there is, of course, a whole lotta fucking going on.

Many, many people find Superman to be the most boring superhero, because he is too powerful.

Yes, you can create antagonist to fit the extremely powerful PCs, but you end up savin' the world from the Debil Himself on a weekly basis.

There's nothing wrong with you liking that, dude, but don't have a whinge that it's not everybody's cuppa.

@HelloRaptor said:

no denying that XP for activity/participation serves to motivate people to participate more.

I have my doubts about that, knowing a decent number of flat XP-per week games that are regardless active.

Participation is its own reward, I thinks.

re: wait times. I always figure that the time it took to earn the XP is the time it takes to learn something. But they're acceptable to me, and they do make sense in situations where different characters earn XP at wildly different rates.

Heh. That's why it would be a limited-time-only thing, not your regular PC.

@Ganymede is, in my opinion, spot-on about the too-powerful characters. I do not find them fun to GM or play. Drama is dependent upon the weaknesses of characters. Characters without weaknesses are a bore.

How about:

Nightvale* is a remote little town where Mages who have gone batshit crazy from magicin' it up too hard (I can't remember the proper term for this phenomenon) go to heal or die or just be nuts or go catatonic. It's actually under some dome of ward thingies that prevent the rest of the world from noticing this, keep it (relatively, under the circumstances) safe, and make it easier for ordinary mortals to cope with all this crazy shit.

PCs are mortals, but every so often, in turns, players get a chance to take over an NPC batshit Mage and make her do looooopy shit with her awesome powers.

*replace with name of game's town

@ThatOneDude said:

@Ganymede Right, and that's the beauty of the internet and the choices out there, correct?

Hardly. The MUSH world is pretty small. This is why we have people on other parts of the board asking, "Is there any non-WoD game to recommend?" and such. It can be right hard to find a game that suits you. The internet is huge when it comes to choices for porn and you can meet just about any fetish you want, but when it comes to finding a MUSH, no.

My experience, if I am going to have success (that is, I play a while and it's fun) on a game, it needs to meet certain desires.

Probably for everyone there's

#1: RP is happening at times when I can and want to play.

This is followed by a load of other stuff, which people value at varying degrees. Do I understand the game world? Do I connect with it? Do they allow the type of character I want to play? Is it consent, dice, a hybrid thereof? If there's a dice system, is it one I like? Do people I know I like to RP with play there, or want to play if I do? Does somebody I can't stand staff there or otherwise have a lot of power over how things go? Does it feel welcoming?

Everybody probably has their own list of preferences, with elements that range in importance from 'that's a deal-breaker, won't play there' to 'not what I'd like best, but I don't mind.'

You can't expect to find your perfect game. I (and probably many others) can't even expect to build it. If I had the code skill to make the game with all the features, functions, policies, game-world etc. that are just exactly what I think is the very bestest a MUSH could have, it probably wouldn't meet the desires of other people enough to attract enough of a player-base to meet that #1 condition of RP being available.

We end up talking about all sorts of MUSH design elements, looking for the variant that falls between 'great!' and 'I don't mind' for the greatest number of players who fit the vague profile of players we'd like to attract.

See, that would just make me say, "Why the fuck are you giving me all this XP that I can't spend?" and I'd be vaguely frustrated, though I wouldn't care enough to complain with any emphasis. Good games are good regardless of this seemingly widespread custom.

I'd much prefer few XP. Though people do get a lot of pleasure from meaningless points, like votes, so accumulating those as a separate thing seems worthy.

Good heavens, @Ganymede, I thought it was pretty much a given that when I post my opinions they're my opinions, so, yeah, if I say something is part of the fun, I mean it's part of my fun. I'm saying what I like, as a player, not demanding you, or anyone, conform to it.

I can certainly see why one might want to simply play the character you want to play, and not have character advancement at all. Not ideal from my POV, but for the right game I wouldn't complain.

Nothing renders XP more meaningless than having it doled out so freely that everyone can, across the board, destroy any reasonable opposition. In my opinion, The Reach makes XP gain meaningless because there's so damned much of it.

Yes. Really, as a general rule, MUSHes give out too much XP, and characters advance too fast. Even when XP spends are limited.

That's fine. That's your preference. It's not everyone's preference.

Is it actually anyone's preference to be awarded tonnes of XP but find that somehow rules have been set up that prevent them from spending it?

Come back. Kevyn's player! Come back!

You love Game of Thrones, by funder.

Isn't there still a 1920's historical about?

From a player point of view: "New PCs are not at a substantial disadvantage," pretty much says, "You cannot advance your PC." If an old, experienced PC has no substantial advantage over a brand new one, how has that old PC advanced?

Being able to advance a PC is part of the fun.

As a player, I've found that a lot of policies designed to reduce 'stat inflation' are simply making my XP meaningless. You can only spend so many XP per week? I don't spend for a while, 'cause I've got other things on my mind, and then find I've got a hoard of XP that I can't possibly spend. I've had the experience of having to get staff approval for XP spends and finding that my staffer refuses to approve any of my spends (and indeed, responded to all my requests in that area by telling me that he would never have approved my character) though this was staff misbehaving, I think.

I find it much, much less annoying to earn XP very very very slowly yet be able to spend it freely. Then the XP is scarce, yes, but it's mine, and I don't feel conned.

Makes sense, but since I don't play nWoD (I do, I believe, have digital copies of most of the books) you'll have to tell me where to pull the data from. Send me a message with some details and I shall Contemplate This Upon the Tree of Woe.

Edited to replace 'most of the books' with 'most of the core books.' I've no idea how many splats have appeared since.

In what sort of DB?

@Cobaltasaurus -- For what? Is there money in it? I am an underemployed cataloging librarian, in the real world.