Posts made by L. B. Heuschkel

@reimesu Well, now I'm not trying to restrain a manly sniffle into my breakfast, nope. Damn onion fairies.

Edited to remove a game which I felt compelled to leave after massive disagreements about game policy.

@faraday said in What do player-STs need?:

It's a hard balance to strike, maintaining continuity, theme and fairness without discouraging folks in the process. You can try to be positive and encouraging, but some folks are just going to take it hard no matter what you do.

And sometimes, as a player running things, you just need to accept that not every game is made for you. Sometimes, what staff has laid down is not what you want. It doesn't mean anything else. Adapt to their vision, or find a game that is more aligned with your ideas.

Staff can lay out pretty clear guidelines. And sometimes, that's just not enough, or it's the wrong game, and it really doesn't mean more than that. Can't please everyone, can't get it right for everyone.

@Caggles said in What do player-STs need?:

How DARE you run things that people might enjoy. Back in your box!

Sowwy, boss.

@Tinuviel said in What do player-STs need?:

@L-B-Heuschkel said in What do player-STs need?:

I need to not feel that anything I do may result in angry forum posts

Well. There's absolutely no way to ever guarantee that.

No. But there is knowing that the odds are 99% versus, it can happen but it probably won't.

@Misadventure I need to not feel that anything I do may result in angry forum posts or retcons or otherwise having staff telling me I am not doing things the way they want. If this is the case, I very quickly stop doing things at all, because I'm not on a game to cause trouble. I will read the framework put to me before I do things, obviously -- but I have, once, been on a game where the message was 'go do all the things', and then every single time someone did, there were 'please don't do those things' from admin staff. That wilts an urge to be proactive fast.

Apart from that, not really. Well, again, an interested audience, but staff doesn't provide those.

@Misadventure I can only say that I have sometimes have had a headsup about some metaplot development that might come in useful, but on the by and by, I don't know anything other regular players don't. I'm not a ST on Gray Harbor -- just a regular player who likes to run plots.

On Trelawney Cove I can't quite answer because, well, I'm staff there so yeah, I obviously do know what's in the works.

@Misadventure To me, seeding ideas is a combination of dropping hints and suggestions of things that may happen down the line; introducing an NPC who will be a big deal later, or dropping information that seems not so relevant now, until suddenly next week, someone goes OH WAIT.

It can also be bringing up new angles or different points of view to the existing -- inspiring players to grab a ball and run with it. I think the best example I've seen was a closing scene in a storyline I did in which the villain NPC was defeated. A supernatural creature, it was then brought back by another player and adopted as a guardian spirit by them -- which leads to all kinds of new shenanigans.

To me, a lot of this has to do with letting go of the reins. You throw balls up in the air; some of them get caught. Players think outside of the box, do things you had not expected -- you grab those balls and run with them. Stories never turn out the way I expect and that is part of what keeps me entertained. Nothing like planning a big epic fight, only to have the gang shame a sixteen tons dragon into slinking off like an embarrassed puppy.

On the official metaplot/staff-run things: I tend to run pretty parallel because that way, I can do what I want to do without needing to coordinate closely (this is a big deal for me since I'm in European time and having to wait to talk to someone in PST will literally slow everything to a halt for 24 hours or more).

I also enjoy doing what I call ambience events -- we had a major storm of the century plot on Gray Harbor recently, and during that, I ran stuff in a hurricane shelter. So, related to the official story, but not so closely tied in that I lock anyone in anything.

@Arkandel Yes. This is why you need to know, from staff, where the edges of the sandbox are. What sort of loot can I let players take off with? What kind of change can I make?

And if the answer to either is 'none', I'm still good. I am very much the kind of story teller who values character development and moral quandaries over loot and boss kills; and of course this is also reflected in who decides to join my stuff. Not every event is for every audience, after all.

So for me, personally, the answer is still -- warm bodies, and clear instructions on what I can and cannot let my players do.

@Arkandel said in What do player-STs need?:

It can end up looking very much like staff does not want you to run a plot that has any impact at all, rather than just trying to make it fair and clear for everyone.

Yes. I have been places that fell into this pitfall. The rules need to be a hell of a lot simpler. Give me, "Nope, you can't make any long term change but feel free to give them some baubles and personal development" and I can work with that. Anything more complex, I'm happy to toss in a request first and get staff approval (or disapproval).

Just, please, don't make me read 500 pages to see if I can rules lawyer my way into possibly running something without ending up with a reprimand.

What I need is players who want to be there. Anything else I can fake, work around, make shit up about, and sort out.

The other thing I need is, as Silverfox also points out, is to know what I'm not allowed to do. What kind of ideas am I allowed to seed? What kind of impact can I have? What kind of thinking am I allowed to inspire in characters?

@silverfox I'm so sorry. Hit me up on Discord if you just need someone to hold a pillow while you scream into it, ok?

Others have already addressed the other issues (and I am inclined to agree with Ghost as a relative newbie that there are definitely The Way Things Have Always Been Done Here in this hobby). So I'll just tack an opinion onto one thing in your post:

Since my RL job makes my availability limited, if these people don't choose of their own volition to take a break during the limited days I can play, I have to either court trouble by joining a public scene knowing they also want to join, or just skip that day and know it will be a week before I get another chance.

There are games out there, run on the Ares platform, that try to cater specifically to the fact that not everyone can be around every night in US prime time to catch all the action. Some do it deliberately, others simply have a player base in which a lot of people can't sit around all the time for various reasons.

Personally I can't because health and European time. Most people I play with are any combination of fellow Europeans, chronically ill, chronically fatigued, or just don't have much time. So we do asynchronous scenes instead, and, well, it works.

Not going to claim this play style never has drama or player politics, but there does seem to be less of it. Probably because play time is that much more precious when you have little of it, and you're not going to waste it arguing.

Just tossing that out there to help remove at least one obstacle.

@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.

@Caryatid I remember people asking this question when the first Vampire: The Masquerade came out in the late 80s. XD

@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.

@Darren Except it literally didn't for us. I can only speak from personal experience. We got no traffic from there, ever.

@GreenFlashlight That's... creepy as fuck. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people? Don't approach a guest, tell them what to app unless they bloody well ask for an IC in to your own char or something.

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.

@Sunny Lordy, how tedious. I'm glad to be new enough to this hobby to not have seen enough to set my clock by it. Just going to agree that no, the hobby is definitely not dying.

@GangOfDolls This. When we opened Trelawney Cove to the public earlier this month, that became policy -- at this time, the game needs to be casual friendly. Players have so much crap on their hands with 2020 being what 2020 is -- they need to be able to come and go at the pace that suits them, without feeling that they've been left in the dust.