Best posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@L-B-Heuschkel True, but at the same time we've been saying these things for centuries. And we know, generally, they're not true even if we say them. They're not innocent by any means, but they're very rarely taken seriously by anyone intelligent or important.

Fortunately. Have a few family units to whom they are unfortunately not jokes at all, and let me tell you, travelling in Southern Europe with those people was an experience. No, mum, the Italian waiter is not stealing your bag. Yes, mum, the Maltese airport security guy can in fact tell you to wait behind the line on the floor.

@Caractus If the game was still up I'd ask you to go point at one such character on it. You were not the only person whose overtly sexual app was rejected.

@Roz Always best to clarify that right there before the scene even starts. And yes, approaching someone and asking if they want to do something only to have them bail the instant they realise that I'm not on US time is pretty common -- but at least it's less disappointing than having them abandon the scene three poses in.

@Derp said in Pacing in Ares Scenes:

You think slowing the pace of scenes is bad

Hee. For me, of course, it means I could even get back into the hobby after a ten year plus break.

The Advertisements section is a good place to look? Personally I play on two games which I find to be quite drama free, but of course everyone's experiences differ.

As well as a historical non-fantasy, Trelawney Cove.

Plenty games out there. Plenty quiet on most these days because of the trauma conga that is 2020. I'm not personally seeing this as the end of the world -- I'd rather play with 4-5 dedicated people anytime over 200 randoms who are largely there to play MU* Tindr.

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

I've heard anecdotal stories of younger folks new to MUSHing being drawn into Ares games.

Allow me to make that less anecdotal, then. Ares is what allowed me to join this hobby last year, after giving up on MUDs a decade ago because I could no longer sit up all night.

@faraday said in Is this hobby on it's last legs?:

MMOs of today don't look or play the same as the original Ultima Online, but we still consider them MMOs because there's a certain core that they share in common.

Heavens, I remember the whining on LegendMUD when Ultima Online's Designer Dragon took off to become, well, Designer Dragon.

Yep, that's when the hobby died fo sho. It's just taking a little while to realise it's dead.

When the news come up with something like this:

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/escaped-cloned-female-mutant-crayfish-take-over-belgian-cemetery/YZDGK4GTJKKML7Y76OELOTHGPA/

And a handful of different people independently send it to me, telling me this is so much about my character, and I have make it happen.

It's happening.

I am finding that there is a core of truth to the idiom that tabletop RPGs in general do not translate well to MUSH'es -- it's not just WoD though the competitive setting of WoD doesn't help.

The underlying issue is that a tabletop group is very much us against them. You have 5-7 characters against the game world. They don't have to be literally back against the wall, fighting everything -- but their core concept is 'how do we survive and make things happen', their little group against the world they live in.

A MUSH community is the world. There's too many people, too many stories, to keep it that simple. So to migrate that concept in a fashion that doesn't invite pvp and backstabbing you need to have a game setting that's still us against them. Players are the good guys, working against an external enemy. Not necessarily as one team or one group, but when push comes to shove? Shoot the alien, not Private Hendricks. Hendricks may be an asshole, but that's an alien.

A game that has other players as enemies on equal footing with an external enemy will see a lot of pvp and backstabbing ic -- and a lot of players who fail to keep ic and ooc separate because ultimately, we're only humans and bleed happens.

@lotherio Yes and no. I came to the MUSHing world from MUDs, and it's not my experience that people are any less attached to characters in MUDs. In fact, almost the opposite -- if they've invested hundreds of hours in grinding skills and gear, they don't want to start over because of a couple of unlucky rolls.

@tinuviel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

Most games I see these days rely on players to do much of the day-to-day storyrunning, not staff members.

That's one of those interesting things where I find people are very divided. Some players want staff to actively run a lot of things. Others (hi, I'm in that camp) want staff to run significantly less -- because when a game has a lot of staff-sanctioned plot, players inevitably start to attach less value to player-run staff, i.e. my stuff. It does suck when people don't want to do things because they feel that the stuff doesn't matter -- it's not staff run so why bother.

There's a happy middle ground and it lies somewhere around all plot is good plot, and staff and players both get access to the tools and the recognition for making things happen.

Games often die when that one staff member who ran everything burns out. I've been that person, and I know how valuable it is that players also make things happen themselves. Optimally (to me) there's always more things going on from more story runners than I know about, whether I'm staff or not.

On some level I do feel it's too easy to sit back as a player and just hold onto my popcorn while expecting staff to keep stuff running. It's obviously a commitment staff made when opening a game -- but we also need to remember that this is a hobby and no one gets paid for the work they put in. If things are going to keep staying lively and exciting, also for the story runners, things need to happen that they don't already know how will turn out, don't have to drive, don't need to do the homework for, too.

Or, well, that's how it works for me. I obviously don't speak for everyone. I do know I always seem to function best on games that have a main plot thread going but staff largely don't mind/encourage me to do all my own stuff on the side. I tell stories, that's what I do.

@il-volpe said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I do hear "We need staff-run plots!" and "Staff ran another event for Abelard, Brigid and Camille, and wouldn't include me, that's the third time this month!"

Staff obviously should get to run stuff for their personal circle too. If there's a pattern of 'friends only' every time, though, staff may have forgotten that they opened this game to the public, and some level of public accessibility is not unreasonable to expect.

Personally I try very hard to do a 50/50 split. Half the stuff I do I do for me -- this is my char's development, his story, with his buddies. The other half, I either run as narrator or through an NPC, or at most, in a low key presence as my char -- and I will schedule those, make them accessible to anyone who signs on.

It's pure selfishness. If I only play with my existing mates I don't meet new exciting people. Running stuff for others lets me feed my story telling drive and meet new playmates. Win-win.

@cupcake said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I generally have to try and disengage when that kind of thing happens or else I know I'm going to get ugly.

It's good to know when to walk away. But it's even better to not have to -- which is what I'm hoping for with this thread. To try to identify some of the issues, and some of the solutions. Not everything will work for everyone, and sometimes, the battle is lost.

But not always. I'm not going to pretend that after 35 years in the hobby in some form or other, I'm not still having a quiet moment of They invited ME!!! ZOMG!!!one! when someone sends me a note or a request for a scene. After all this time, I'm still genuinely surprised when someone actively seeks me out. And frankly, I think that goes for a lot of us. That we are not unwanted, but we let our brain weasels convince us that we are.

And that we let a few assholes convince us, too, because it takes just a few people with a bad attitude to render a game unplayable for a lot of us. We've certainly seen that happen over and over again.

I think one of the hardest lessons for me has been that everything is transient. People you play with today will be gone tomorrow. And keeping things alive for myself means a constant move towards getting to know and include the new people. There's no such thing as leaning back and just hanging with your friends because when you do -- you wake up one morning and realise it's gotten awful quiet in here and it's because everyone else left.

Not because they hate or dislike you. Just because something new and shiny happened over there, or life got in the way. In a way, inclusion is a constant quest to find new playmates and accepting that the present set will move on. It's not always easy, and I think a lot of us wax nostalgic about old days somewhere or other for exactly this reason.

@seraphim73 There is absolutely nothing wrong with a social 'coffee shop' style scene where a number of people just happen to occupy the same space. It's a good opportunity to spread information around and catch up on what changed after the last big drama. Keep one another up to speed on IC gossip, warn each other about the big bad in the woods, and crack jokes.

I still want to go in there with that specific purpose, though. But that's also all it does take -- to go in, knowing that you're doing a kind of catch-us-up scene. Where it fails for me is just going in, with no purpose or agenda. Because that places the onus on the other person to make sure there is something to talk about or do -- and the other player is not always capable of that. I don't want to waste their time or mine, so I always try to have a backup plan.

On the game I staff on we've outright banned antagonist characters -- but that doesn't mean everyone needs to sit and hold hands around the campfire. Our theme technically makes it possible to bring in very antagonistic groups such as the Spanish Inquisition or WWII Nazis (the literal examples used) and we don't want those.

Why? Because we are telling the story of a group of people in a situation, and how they manage to survive in that situation. If they end up murdering each other in back alleys instead of taking on the game's antagonists, it's going to be a short and miserable story.

That, however, does not mean that people aren't allowed to antagonise each other. Want to play someone with miserable social skills or for that matter, a manipulative asshole? Fine by us as long as you realise that any consequences of your IC behaviour are also for you to deal with. People aren't always nice. People aren't always capable of getting along. People are sometimes dicks.

The key issue -- to my eyes as a game designer -- is what kind of antagonism the game 'officially' sanctions. If you have factions like the example above, of Camarilla and Sabbat, then members of those are going to be in opposition to one another. If you don't have factions or everyone is a part of the same faction, then some people are still going to be in opposition to each other simply because they don't share views or just plain don't get along. This is fine.

The trick is to avoid indirectly sanctioning OOC dickish behaviour. You don't want the kind of 4chan edgelord who comes onto a game with the single purpose of antagonising everyone else in the name of freedom of speech and lol get a sense of humour.

This is why we run PVE, not PVP. Too old, too tired, too jaded to deal with more of those. Which, again, does not mean that we prohibit people from being dicks IC -- we just don't give them a shield to hide behind when their dickery has consequences from other players.

@kestrel That's an interesting idea -- and I'm not sure it's a bad one, either. But to retain a map -- yeah, players will need to be able to pencil in.

What we do on Keys is grow the grid organically based on player requests -- shops, houses. And then we use the real life Google maps of Chincoteague -- if you want somewhere that isn't on the grid, well, it's there, somewhere. Make it up. And if it becomes popular/used enough? We add it to the grid.

Best of both worlds or the laziest cop-out ever, you decide!

@ell This is also the case on Keys and I know for a fact that we have not changed that there. I think it defaults to open from a client, though.

@faraday It's all about game culture, not codebase, indeed. Ares makes it easy as pie to set scenes to private or open whether from the client or the portal. The decision to do either lies with the player.

Echoing what Tinuviel said: Smaller groups. I list my events that people can sign up for as four seats only (though if I know that everyone who signed up can play well in a group, I may take five or six). It's far too easy to lose someone or end up with four separate storylines in one scene otherwise.

Also, don't be afraid of narrative buttkicking. If it takes an NPC with an ego to herd all the cats in one direction, do it.

@seraphim73 said in Meshing Groups:

I also agree that @mietze's mention of being OOCly up-front and honest about the situation: "This is a scene to get all our characters connected." This will give the players incentive to connect the characters, and when they react to that thing you're doing as the GM that they all have to react to, they don't just react by fleeing the scene.

Or if they do -- well, if they joined the scene knowing its OOC purpose and then proceed to do the exact opposite, at least you have some basis for not making that player's meshing in a priority compared with the ones who are actively trying.