Posts made by il-volpe

@enoch Almost as much as Tin thinking he's mostly overcome his reputation rather than started playing with people who don't know it and/or like Flying Monkeys.

@kk The Canonical List of Banjo Jokes

@kanye-qwest Oh, I wasn't nice about it.

Gashlycrumb#3103

Actual worst:

Not carefully and gently double-checking with some players who had complaints about a third player. I thought it was a lot less serious than it was and didn't realize it was ongoing. Someone who was being shitty got to stay on my game, while two or three people who'd done nothing wrong and were valued players felt they had to leave.

Declaring that an idled-out PC had died (I was actually rolling a die to determine where all the idle-dested characters were) and refusing the request of a player (who'd never actually RPed with him but was ICly his brother) to have him not be dead for OOC feelings reasons. I have no idea why I did this.

Consequences-for-me worst:

Taking people's word for it that their shitty actions were mistakes, even after multiple times and them having hissy fits to the effect that it's wrong to want to fix problems if they're not on purpose. This may be called "Not Taking the Hint" in allistic-world.

@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...

@silverfox The wildfire that destroyed a lot of my, uh, census designated place in 2013 killed a couple of people who were refusing to evacuate because they thought it was too early. Caution for the win.

I'm glad your folks are safe.

@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.

@faraday Ah! Yeah, the problem with the medical drama is that they tend to focus on an 'NPC', the patient, who must be appealing and knowable in some way -- requiring many of hours of GM time on a MU -- or there's no investment in the story and one starts to notice how medical dramas are really, really repetitive. This is a lot to ask of GMs, even if it's one NPC and the team of PC doctors.

@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.

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?

@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.

@kk Hmm, something like your idea is in the works.

@bear_necessities said in GMs and Players:

@ganymede said in GMs and Players:

If you are perceived as having bias then you should no longer staff.

So I'm going to disagree with that point, because I'm 110% positive that every staff on every game is at some point perceived as having a bias.

It's true. Run a MU long enough (and in this case, long enough is not long) and somebody will be bound to accuse you of bias.

But I figure Gany really meant 'if it's reasonable for reasonable people to perceive you as biased.' Somewhat like how cops can search your house if they perceive it as a likely crime scene, but said perception has to be something like a trail of blood leading to your door. The way your eyeliner gives Officer Fuckley the creeps won't cut it.

It's certainly a bad idea to dismiss any/all perception of bias. Fuckley being weird about eyeliner and a liar does not mean that Andy and Barney Fife don't really see blood.

Among my year's bumper crop of stupid shit said to me about MUs was that problems on MUs are "almost always just player perception." It wasn't a thanks captain obvious, yes, everything about games is pretty much about player perception, perceiving oneself to be having fun is the point kinda stupid, they meant that player perceptions are wrong and the problems not real.

@ganymede

Adam, ranting: Why do I bother? Why do I even cook?

Assistant: Because you're hungry?

Adam: What did you just say?

Assistant: Nothing.

Adam: Oh, you did. You said something. Say it. Say it!

Assistant: Because you're hungry.

Adam: Yes. Because I'm hungry. I, Adam, am hungry! I want to eat! And what do I want to eat? Something that you made? No! I want something good. I want something that I made!

Northern Exposure (1990–1995): Season 4, Episode 21 - "The Big Feast"

@greenflashlight Yes.

@tributary I wonder if people aren't kinda forgetting that VASpider, in their heyday, had, like, all the bona fides and then some. So if they were saying Abelard was abusive, you'd also have at least half a dozen Flying Spider Monkeys confirming it, and assorted fans saying, "I know VASpider, they would never lie about something like that," and very likely your own experience of an active, helpful, and fun-creating player who didn't seem like the sort of person who'd accuse someone they barely ever saw of harassment. So you might not believe Abelard at all. And if you did but there was a level of ambiguity or a common 'both of you have been dicks,' type situation, well, Spider had the goodwill points.

My friend's former roommate, in too-small housing at that, left a bunch of prescription pills behind. Which my friend finally went through. Three of 'em are part of the RIPE regimen for tuberculosis. Each with just one dose missing.

@greenflashlight I found it helpful in that it's nice to know that not everyone wants to give these ideas a pass. You're right that getting all yellow about the eyeballs isn't ideal.