Best posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@mietze Raph Koster once described this as the 3/8 month slump. A large number of players quit after three months -- that's when the new shiny has worn off. Another large number quits after 8 months -- that's when they feel they've done it all. Anyone who stays after that is staying until the plug is pulled. It's pretty damn important in game design to keep in mind which of these three you are designing for -- otherwise, you might not survive the first mass departure, and definitely not the second.

You can absolutely list a MUSH on Mudconnector, and Discworld did. We never got a single guest connecting from that.

I fervently disagree that there are no new games, no energy, though. There's literally a game opening a month, if not more often. Sure, not all of them survive -- but most do seem to find their little niche of players who are quite happy. I guess it's about what constitutes 'success' -- if success means 200 connected players at all times, then yeah, this ship is sunk.

Both games I am on (Trelawney Cove, Gray Harbor) see daily activity among the core group of players, even at the present time where everything is one big stressed-out mess. You may not be able to just walk in and pick a random open scene to join -- but then, I never was, since I play from Europe, so to me, that's nothing out of the ordinary.

But then, I'm an easy costumer. Give me a handful of players who are happy to tell stories and I'm set.

@Derp said in Emotional bleed:

@L-B-Heuschkel

I agree. That's the approach I usually take.

The problem I see is when the character is being a dick and the player doesn't want to accept the character being called a dick because the player gets hurt OOC. It feels like a 'get out of jerkass free' card, and I'm really not on board with it, nor do I think it's healthy for any player involved in such a situation.

Yeah, then we're back at the 'lol it's just RP' excuse where people either try to pretend that they're not hurt (but they totally are) or tell you that you have no right to feel hurt just because they just walked all over you.

@GangOfDolls It is generally a wise choice to ask if anyone's got a squick around whatever, before you throw it at them. Just as it's a good idea to tell people if you have an unusual squick. I know people who refuse to RP around the topic of pregnancy -- around infidelity -- and for myself, competition. I can't and won't deal with anything that might bleed into OOC competitive territory -- and others have other reservations of their own.

It's IC/OOC bleed, definitely. But it's also taking responsibility for it, and not inflicting your trauma on everyone else -- or putting yourself through something that only rips up old wounds.

@GangOfDolls said in Emotional bleed:

This is different just exploring a thing. Exploration of human behavior and meaning is way different.

Those are very different things. One is a thought experiment -- say, what would it be like to be a gay sailor in 1930s London, or whatever. The other is a potential meltdown in the making, because even when therapy is wildly successful, therapy hurts.

@il-volpe Hmm, Ares has a smidgen of it in that you accumulate Luck by scening, and more Luck by scening with new characters or characters you haven't scened a lot with before. It's a nice little touch -- and probably as far as I am comfortable with it going.

It's a good reminder that the game wants you to meet new people. But it's not enough to make 'farming newbies' viable. Because that's the other extreme of that -- people doing pointless, no-content scenes just to get a notch on the score card.(1)

But that's a thing that applies to any and all game systems: Ultimately, you can't code yourself into good game culture. You can remove some of the obvious hurdles -- favourite example here is pvp style games that actively give you xp for killing easy things such as other players, even the big MMOs learned quick to not reward farming the newbies. But ultimately, game culture is built in spite of game mechanics, not on them.

(1) Disclaimer: A scene is not pointless if you enjoyed it. Bar RP, slice of life RP, chatting sports at the laundromat RP, is all not pointless if you enjoyed it or felt you built IC relationship from it. Pointless means a scene where someone walks in, drops a few poses about being too bored for this shit, and walks out, wasting the space they occupied.

@derp said in A healthy game culture:

That's FS3, not specifically Ares.

I stand corrected.

I also agree with Pyrephox above about incentive and not taking it too far. I've been on games where people would have wild and massive OOC arguments about when you deserve a virtual cookie for a scene. The cookies had no game mechanics effect. They were just numbers that got posted to a weekly leaderboard. The arguments were rabid.

I am not a fan of 'popular scenes this week' posts or 'cookie leaderboard' posts for this reason. Competitiveness is not necessarily our friends in a community based game.

@silverfox said in A healthy game culture:

I'm actually really torn on if it's vital to have staff who also play. On one hand, it'll keep them happier and more involved. However, it also makes it really hard (speaking from my own experience) to have that distance from the immediacy of a situation/individual that is causing an issue.

Staff should play -- because what's the point of creating the exact game you want, if you don't get to play it? And more so, what's the point of doing all the admin and behind the curtain work if you don't get to have the fun? Even when paid, staff should play, so they have a feeling for what's going on. I remember a friend telling me that as a WoW game master for Blizzard, they had to play, it was literally part of the job, back then -- to keep tabs on what's going on in the player base (it may obviously have changed since, I'm not a Blizzard employee and while they are, they work servers nowadays).

It's also important to avoid the mindset of us against them. When a game turns staff against players, the game tends to get harsh very quick.

@il-volpe said in A healthy game culture:

MU GMs who treat it as the price one pays to get enough control over the game to have your PC (regardless of if you call her an NPC or not) get to be super-cool ought to have learned to do better during table-top games when they were 12.

That, pretty much. GMing is hella fun. But if you never have any feeling of risk or loss, you stop feeling the impact. Someone who only plays NPCs does not.

It's legit to have rules in place to stop staff alts from ascending to the top in a player hierarchy, though. Got to be a limit to how many dung heaps you can be top beetle on at once.

Also, frankly? If staff declares that it's their game and they'll do what they want and if you don't like it, leave -- leaving is in fact an option. Just because a game exists doesn't mean you have to play it.

@kk said in A healthy game culture:

That plot belongs to so and so.

No. No plot should ever belong to any one person. If a game has a mad number of say, homeless urchins, it's legit to close that option in applications for a while. But anything that is on grid, belongs on grid, and nothing is the exclusive territory of one clique or player.

@pyrephox said in Battling FOMO (any game):

@l-b-heuschkel said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I find that open scenes and open plot events are a very big deal when it comes to battling this. Make it hinge less on me to reach out -- I am putting myself somewhere and signaling I'm available, and if people secretly hate my company they can just not turn up.

Alas, then no one turns up to your open scenes, either, and there's nothing quite as crushing as sitting for an hour or two with an open scene, uh, open and no one showing a lick of interest.

Events aren't so bad, because if no one signs up, then you just don't run it. But man, those open scene deserts hurt.

Yeah, they do. A trick I've found to work there is to have a couple of other people whom you know share the same brain weasel breed. Start those scenes together. If there's a scene sitting with just one person in it, people tend to skip it -- I have no idea why, but I see it often. If there's two -- a third won't hurt, and a fourth, and so on. I'm not sure how this works; you'd think one person sitting there all the attention ready would be enticing, but it actually frightens a lot of people off. Whereas stomping into a conversation that's already going on apparently is a lot less intimidating.

@vixanic said in Battling FOMO (any game):

I feel this so very much. Between not having much time during the week, and being in an inconvenient time-zone, it feels like all I can do is casual RP, rarely if ever events, and just doing things via jobs is distinctly unfulfilling.

Not keen on jobs myself. They're necessary for some things but RP it ain't. At best, it's something to RP about.

Casual RP is my staple though. Probably because I am also in an inconvenient timezone (CET). I don't think you should think less of yourself for this. Events and hunting the plot is all good and well, but a game does not feel like a living community without everything else that goes on.

It's the inter-personal relationships I enjoy the most as a player -- and yes, I realise what that sounds like, but I'm not talking about TS. I like getting to know other characters, to form bonds and connect. To feel that I am part of a living, breathing community, where sometimes, saving the world will have to take second seat to what Our John said about Our Susy because priorities.

Insert obligatory spiel about asynchronous scenes solving a lot of the timezone issues too, if one has the kind of mind they work for (I know people who just can't, however much they want).

Coffee shop RP can be boring as heck.

It can also be a way to get information out there to the people who missed out, filling them in and getting them up to speed on game gossip.

I suppose it depends somewhat on the motivation for the scene.

For me, it's a simple matter of the Ares web portal doing some things very well and the client doing some things very well. Both can do pretty much what the other can do but some things are simply easier in one than in the other.

In my setup I do poses, forum, wiki-editing, etc on the portal. I do channels, help files, and pages on the client. Spawns means I have easy overview without having to change tabs -- things just scroll along happily outside my browser tab and I click over there when I need to react to something. Just like Discord, really.

@krmbm Allow me to toss the kudo on to the players who were cool with a simple solution to a situation that's honestly a little weird with the whole 'who actually owns intellectual property' situation. An argument not worth wasting time on was avoided, this is a good thing.

@lotherio We have done something along those lines on Keys insofar that every player who wants to can set up a reality of their own and make of it what they will. It seems to be working okay.

@faraday said in Armageddon MUD:

@Ghost I think the key is expectations. People have to not take the game (and their characters) so bloody seriously.

This is something that's come up a few times over at our place recently -- not surprisingly since we are now, what, about a month old, and players have started trickling in without actually being somebody's buddy shanghaied over from that other game over there.

Ours is a game of comedy and satire, and hence, finding the balance between slapstick and gimmicks on one side and the sharp and scathing social commentary of Terry Pratchett on the other, takes effort. It does matter, a lot. Characters who are too pie-in-face-harhar end up not contributing to scenes, in fact killing them dead if they just fall silent after they've done whatever their funny thing is. Characters who are all gritty grimdark take themselves so seriously that in Discworld, narrative tropes almost guarantee they don't live long.

Faraday's point is everything. Take your character seriously enough that you contribute to the game and the story, but not so bloody seriously that you confuse it with yourself. And certainly not so seriously that nothing bad can happen to it, that a trauma conga renders it unplayable. Respect not just your fellow players but also yourself enough to not cross that line.

@Auspice Well said. Especially about the creativity on tap part. I am a writer as well -- now retired and trying to get published, previously a copywriter -- and it could not be more true. I think part of my deep love for mushes and tabletop roleplaying is that it lets you tell a collaborative story, sharpen the pencils of your imaginations, exercise your tropes, and practise your writing all in one -- and have fun at the same time. I am hopelessly addicted to storytelling.

It's just that writing on your own is a very lonely experience. The process from rough storyboard to published novel is literally years, sometimes decades, during which you and your story are entirely alone with each other.

That's why I need to step out of my own head and into a fandom or a game to practise, or the well dries up due to lack of human interaction.

@Kestrel And learn.

Someone drops a three paragraph bomb of beauty on me I am going to take that sucker apart and see what makes it so gorgeous. I'm going to stare at it until it burns itself into my brain, allowing me to return the favour.

Nobody's perfect. But some mush writers do stuff with words that's pure magic.

@Derp said in Armageddon MUD:
In this instance, the judgment against the players would be OOC because they are embracing one of those uncomfortable topics (slavery/abuse/loss of agency/whatever) that many people like to set up as 'you are a reprehensible person OOC if you support or engage in this behavior, even IC'.

Oh good lord, no. If it says 'contains sex and violence' on the label, expect it to contain sex and violence.

@Auspice Can confirm. I mean, I have to wear an air mask in some places because of asthma; dust does murder on me. I'm a hell of a lot more inclined to get a funny one. XD

@Ghost said in Well, this sums up why I RP:

...cancel culture had made modern authors afraid to write content that wasn't cute, fuzzy bunnies.

Challenge accepted.

No, really. It's just a pity that the publishing houses don't feel the same way because believe me, at least here in Denmark, they worry about it. The big industry publishers play it ridiculously safe, to the point where some of them will only publish translations of guaranteed success English language bestsellers.

Not that I'm going to let that stop me from writing what I want, though.