Best posts made by Lisse24

More important than anything else, if I'm going to stick with a character for a long time, they have to feel real and solid to me.

So, I tend to make characters that are subtle or layered. If they have a tragic backstory, it's unlikely to come out in RP all at once, you might pick up hints of it in some RP, but my character will likely never drop the full story. For example: Cerise on Fate's Harvest has been abandoned/left/betrayed by nearly everyone she ever cared about, but that happened years ago now, and so she's trying to pick her life back up and move on. So, she's not overwhelmingly sad, she's not twisted and tortured, she's doing what humans do ... dealing, and it's how she's dealing that plays into how she approaches the world. Bad relationship with rich, big city parents? Find a town on the edge of nowhere and waste that Harvard education working in a book shop.

It also plays into why I shy away from Superhero games. I mean, maybe I could be lured to one if someone promised me grittiness, real, substantive costs, and limited abilities, but I get the feeling most games aren't that. I also have trouble on WoD games playing the major spheres. I can't ever quite get into the headspace of those characters and empathize with them. I think I've decided I need to do a becoming or two on screen to help with that.

@Tat You had me at slow-paced.

@Auspice said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Lisse24 said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

@Auspice.
I agree. +Scenes does give you some of the info you need, but not enough to be able to find RP reliably. It tells you point 1. Who is already RPing, and whether or not you can join that scene, along with a sense of what that scene might be about.

It does not tell you 2 - 3. In other words, you have no clue who's on and isn't RPing but wants to be and what those scenes may be about. So on Ares you need another tool to work in conjunction with +scenes to fill that gap.

It does tell you what those scenes are about (/summary) if people fill it in. The details in scene info can be filled in at any time, but most of us only do so at the end because we aren't yet conditioned to do it sooner.

Yeah, I was agreeing that it does give that info, sorry if that wasn't clear!

@Tinuviel said in If you work hard, son, maybe someday you'll RP:

Do we really need special tools for this, or simply to adapt ourselves to asking about, and for, RP better?

A lot of my Master's Degree talked about creating performance aids or job aids. These are tools that are designed to help a person do a specific task better. When I talk about tools on MUSHes, I am approaching it through that lens. Before designing a new job aid, you're supposed to judge whether it's an individual issue which needs to be addressed with that individual or if it's an issue that many people performing that same task will have an issue with? Clearly, in this case many people are having the same issue, so it's something we should look at further.

Then you ask whether this is a problem where more information is needed. Can you teach someone how to get around the issue? In my judgment, I don't think this is an issue where there's an information deficit.

Then you consider whether you can tweak the already existing environment/culture to reach the desired outcome. As @Sparks points out, Ares' +scene system may already be able to provide the needed information. So for me, the test is whether on Ares people start to make that change, or whether they can be nudged to make that change, shifting the culture so people use +scenes both as a RP-finder and as the conduit of RP. If players do not make that shift, then it is not their fault and we are asking something unreasonable of them. If the shift is not made, then yes, you need to provide a better tool.

On non-Ares games, obviously the issue will still exist. I would encourage pushing people back to the grid, but people are resistant to that culture change. We'll have to consider whether there is a different environmental/cultural change to be made, or whether a tool is needed. At this point, I'm pretty convinced better tools are needed, but if people can tell me what else they can change, I'm willing to hear it.

I've got thoughts:

I want surprises, sure, but I also get stressed on games where OOC communication is discouraged. This is because I know when I'm getting screwed, but I don't know if it's me the player getting screwed or me the character. I will totally go along with my character getting screwed if I know that it's happening, and the player controlling the character doing it is really a cool guy. I think having all players on the same page OOCly is essential to healthy PvP conflict.

Now, I don't need to know all the details about what another player is doing, but I need to know the broad strokes enough to feel comfortable with how things are going down. That means I do need information.

On a game that's not PvP, I struggle to find justification for keeping secrets. Spirit Lake is about the lowest drama game I've ever played on, and sure, some of that is the players, but it's also because everything is just out there. There's also not a problem on that game with people using OOC knowledge ICly. My characters secret is being kept an IC secret an even though anyone could find it out and start acting weird and suspicious about Will, they haven't.

I think when you create a culture of OOC secrecy, you also end up creating a culture of gossip, back-stabbing, and negativity.

When you create a culture of OOC openness, you're empowering your players to make informed decisions and write great, cooperative stories.

To sum up: I think holding some things back for a plot twist or a fun surprise keeps something interesting, however since openness creates a healthier game culture, the default should be to start with the assumption that everything is shared and then mark things as secret as need be.

Whenever anyone mentions Harpers Tale, I'm reminded that I've likely been playing with some of you FOREVER, but that game is so far back in the reaches of my mind I remember nothing other than a) I was there and b) I was kinda twinky in that new-to-mushing way.

Please don't take this harshly, because it's not meant in that way, just to get you thinking a bit more:

I have a lot of cynicism when it comes to WoD games, because IMO, the way the game is structured leads to lots of sitting and chatting in the OOC room and not so much RP. I have nothing against people who want to connect to a game and chat OOC, but if I can't find RP when I'm around and available to RP, then the game doesn't really work.

I honestly don't care about the system. I'd prefer not to have to constantly think up short-term aspirations, but it's not a breaking point for me. What is a breaking point is not being able to find RP.

With that being said, have you put any thought into what you're going to do in order to promote an active grid and prevent stagnation?

I'd like to add to the discussion in two areas.

@Halicron said:

3. Try to describe your character's mood but do it without having us read your mind.

Most people are reading this as describing only the characters actions and not giving any sort of clue as to the underlying emotions. I used to do that as well, until I was burnt (lost a character) because another player misread my pose. What I thought was clearly trying to hold back emotion while begging for another chance, they read as stony-faced lack of remorse.

Nowadays, I try to blend the two. I'll describe the physical cues, but I'll also make sure that the person I'm playing with has some idea of the emotion associated with them. Ex: Lisse is nervous about something. She picks up her glass, twirls it a second and then sets it down again. Next is the napkin, which she begins to fold over and over. What I don't do is give the other player the reason why the character might be feeling that way or the exact thoughts going on in their head.

Like someone said earlier, people tend to take physical cues and assimilate them as a whole without fully understanding the processes that they use to do so. I think it's unreasonable to expect in a text environment that someone do something they have no experience doing in a real-life environment. Also, like I said, totes got burnt on this one.

9. Be proactive. Give your RP partner something to play off of. These are usually called "hooks," or RP hooks.

I would rather this rule be called, "Look for and respond to hooks," because right now, the phrase "be proactive" is my pet peeve. It seems like I've recently seen a spade of people criticizing players who are reactive. Players are told to "make their own fun" and then criticized when a game seems to be overwhelmed with bar rp.

I think this idea of having proactive players who start a bunch of interesting plots for their fellow players is also unrealistic. It's also not something that we see mirrored in literature, which means that players don't have a good model for it. Think about it. Jack Bauer* doesn't wake up, leave his house, and start killing terrorists. Jack Bauer wakes up, hears that terrorists have hijacked a plane, and then he leaves his house and starts killing terrorists.

My personal belief that it is the responsibility of staff to provide players with something that they can react to and then to help them find a proactive way to deal with that circumstance or complication, and that by doing this you can creative a healthy and active game. In my philosophy this doesn't need to be a full-blown plot, but can rather be little things to make the player's life difficult.

*I have never watched 24

@Sparks

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

But they're not! I mean, the whole problem was that many of us (me included, as noted) treated them as if they were just a means of tracking who knew what. Which is why they spread so far so fast, and left poor Apos spending a non-trivial amount of time every week writing like 30 new ones.

This is a result of what I view as the major falling down of Arx. Don't get me wrong, this is the best thought out game I've played on since RfK and it generally provides what I look for in a game. However, the help files read like they've been written by someone with a technical background and they don't actually tell the players how to use the systems or commands or what these systems and commands are for.

@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I was surprised at the spread of info too. I was treating each clue as a precious secret and only sharing with like one or two people at most and only if I felt they needed to know. Then I realized people were basically holding classes where info was committed at participants. I think a little more traitor element would help here, like in cooperative board games with potential traitor mechanics. Maybe have some agents of Fable amongst the PCs. Give them a clue and suddenly you forget all about it or maybe you start getting hunted down.

Due to an insane RL that started right after I decided to take a PC on the game, I never had many @clues shared with me. I sympathize with the player earlier, who is out doing tasks and stuff and feeling bored, because I was there. You can only do so much if people won't talk to you, and you can't force people to talk to you about plot. Well, you can, but you won't get very far doing it, and without having some base knowledge, you don't even know what you should be bringing up in RP.

However, I digress. My point is, that right now, my character's lack of clues is leading to interesting RP. Everyone in her family is under Fable's gaze and she's the only one who isn't AND SURPRISE, she's now a duchess and needs to make decisions. So there's all this tension around needing to know and knowing too much, which is fun. Also, generally being clueless, is also fun.

@surreality I feel you, it's the same here.

Don't let these guys discourage you! I'm of the opinion that you ignore the attempt to derail and focus on the people that are engaging with what you ask.

You give people a reason that they need/want to interact with newbies and make sure that it ties back into theme.

Crisis, plot investigations, limiting actions, random pairing of RP partners are all things I've seen on multiple games that have worked well.

@WildBaboons said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:

It's been touched on before I think but make sure there isn't a culture of being unfindable. I've played places where over half the players were unfindable and not idle. it really discouraged looking for public RP when you could never tell who was available.

I'll add to this - making it easier for people to connect with people IC. I've pitched this before and got scoffed at, but I'll say it again anyway. The looking for RP tag/channel is horrible (horrible defined as doesn't work well), but if you modified it so that people could add one or more scene-types they were looking for, I think it would be really helpful in getting people to connect.

So instead of +lrp/on (or whatever the command is)

it would be:
+lrp/on Wanting to connect with motorcycle types at the dive bar; Going to woods to track strange tracks.

Again, you want to give people reasons to connect and tools to help them do that.

Just an update with where I've been for two weeks:
A family emergency merged with closing and renovating a new house which merged with Thanksgiving and family time.

On the upside, I have closed on my house (finally!), my kitchen is far less ugly and far more functional than it was a week ago, and I am no longer living with family, all of which equals to me actually being able to focus on gaming for extended periods of time the way I haven't been able to for the past couple of months.

@Aria Man, I hate to start something, but ...

I'm Christian.

I grew up in the Evangelical community, though in a very small, independent tradition, and not among the Baptist wave.

Although, I left my tradition for a mainline denomination, I'm currently attending a church of that same tradition again, because family.

I disagree a ton with what many Evangelicals preach and believe. I do not believe there is a war on Christians. I do not believe Christians should be able to legislate morality, BUT ...

The argument isn't that they're oppressed because they're no longer able to force their beliefs on people. The argument is that they're oppressed because they feel like they can no longer voice their beliefs outside of their own small circle without having half the country jump down their throat for their backwardness and hate. They feel like their not even given the chance to truly explain what they believe or how it differs from more extreme fundamentalists like Westboro Baptist.

And given the amount of conditionals I felt necessary to put at the beginning of this post to keep people from jumping down my throat, they maybe have a bit of a point ...

@Rook Well then, now I know why I'm not popular and have no following.

@Tempest said in What locations do you want to RP in?:

Or at least have my thoughts on why it's so prevalent. And the primary one is that doing something besides bar RP actually requires putting a bit of thought into your character (maybe I'm just getting more and more jaded lately, but a lot of people seem to really really be bad at making even slightly interesting characters --not that I'm a hero of creativity and fun or anything myself but more and more characters these days just feel like generic self-inserts 'i wish I was this pretty prince/princess') and why they would be doing something and setting a Bar RP scene usually requires 0 brain power (and tends to be pretty dull because of that). It also doesn't require communication between the two parties to explain why they'd be there.

So, yeah, I think this is a thing. When I make a character, especially when I make a mortal in a WoD game, I always think about what will make other people want to interact with me. If we take Danielle on F&L she has thing going on in a few different ways. Base level, she's a street artist, so that's an easy hook that can go a few different ways. Deeper, she's a psychic who gets visions of the supernatural world, which has led her to be Highly Suspicious of supers and causes her to go digging around in their business so that she knows what's up and how to protect herself. I don't mind her getting caught doing this, because the goal is not to know everyone's secrets, but to have a reason to be poking around places she wouldn't otherwise be, thus leading to RP.

However, I feel like sometimes people who create a character do so because the concept is interesting, but don't think about who is going to interact with that character or why.

I want to give a shout-out to Fifth Kingdom here, because when I peeked in there, their policy was that everyone had to have a position in court, which, again, helps people establish where/how they'll connect. Likewise, BITN had a rule that everyone had to be 'in the know,' which didn't completely end Bar RP, but did encourage people to create characters with past connections and networks.

TLDR; I don't think it would hurt games to help players think through how their character interacts with the world or other characters, perhaps even setting down hard and fast rules that encourages reasons to interact and interactions that move beyond shallow meetings.

@Ghost You know, I get all paranoid when I try to make "edgy" characters, because I don't want to come off sounding like that.

Obviously, I need to set the bar lower.

I'm working on a single sphere vamp/mortal game set in the Caribbean. I recently converted all my docs to V5, which I kinda love, and then fiddled with the V5 systems to be more inclusive for mortals (since I want the game to be mortal heavy).

I'm currently:

• working out how to integrate a system of mortal thaumaturgy/spell casting in with the V5 stuff, since that's kinda integral to the plot.
• and Mapping out the grid.

Other than that, I'm ready to begin coding and had kind of set aside my extra time over Christmas to poke around with Evennia, since the documentation there is enough that I've about convinced myself that even knowing nothing about setting up a game, I can make it work.

However, if there's anyone out there willing to hold my hand through the coding process, it will certainly make for a better game and get the game up off the ground quicker.

@Tempest said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

@Ganymede You are seriously fooling yourself if you think an RfK-style game would work without a staffer who has massive loads of time to devote to a game she isn't playing.

Like that was pretty much the entire reason behind any success RfK had.

Go quit your job and start spending 12 hours a day playing 'judge' on a vampire game where you have no character. Bam you made a good vampire game.

I think you're fixating on that too much. I don't think staff has to abstain from playing entirely. I disagree that Shav's lack of a character is what made the game work. I think Shav did do a lot that other staff could learn from. I think she was incredibly warm. She was wonderfully encouraging to players and their concepts, but I don't even think those are necessary for a game to succeed. I think a lot of what Shav did could have been automated OR turned over to a panel of players.

If you get out of the mental rut of "Well no one will be Shav, so thinking about RfK is useless!" maybe you'll see some possibilities.

@Rook said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

Question: If staff involvement is so damned critical to the success of the game...

...why do MUDs have magnitudes more players connecting to them, having fun?
...why do MMOs find success?

I fail to agree that staff intervention and chaperoning a game is a required element for plots, story and RP. People RP without staff support on Shangrila, and even have long-running actual RP plots with multiple people, generated entirely from RP.

The difference is, I think, that a WoD game is so over-powered that serious game destruction ability is in the hands of most of the average players.

I disagree entirely with @Tempest, I don't think staff babysitting is necessary at all for long-term RP either in WoD or other genres.

@Gilette said in How to Change MUing:

@Apos

Interesting! It does feel a bit ridiculous to be saying 'shit's fucked' to the idea of there being a few thousand players around. Less so, however, when you factor in time zones, schedules, and the fact that I imagine the MU ecosystem is more like a series of independent habitats than something with permeable layers. I mean, we see it here on MSB. There's your WoD players, your Lords and Ladies, your comic-books, and so on.

For example, logging into any MU during my timezone evening, I would be lucky to find maybe 3-4 people who would be active and less so willing to scene.

However, it astounds me that MUs can have so many people on and so few people doing anything.

I'm just going to throw out that since I work from home and like company, I log in while I'm working. During these times, I'm generally available for something, but I'm not available for anything. I try not to actively seek out RP while I'm working, but I'm generally available if someone needs me for something. My work-time RP tends to be "stuff I need to do" while in the evenings, that's when I focus on expanding my RP circle, meeting new people and opening up new avenues for RP. So, I spend a lot of my workday idling in my chars room, which probably looks like I'm not doing anything, when I'm really just being passive in my approach to RP at that moment instead of active like I am when I'm not working. I think there may be others who approach it in the same way.

My coworker loves thinking of new projects for me to do, without any consideration about how long what she's proposing will actually take me. Nevermind that due to my boss's slow hiring process, I'm currently trying to keep the ball moving in three different positions and am barely getting daily work done, let alone long-term projects.

On the plus side, I've gotten a lot better with telling people very frankly when their work is at the very bottom of my to-do list and what that means for turnaround time.