Best posts made by Lisse24

Everything that @Arkandel said. All of it. Especially the 'access to plot' bit. Far too often Plot goes to either a) the person who is on all the time and able to do all the things or b) the person who has the right connections and hears the right information. This is not good or healthy. You want the newbie who doesn't know anyone to be able to get involved easily. You also want the person who only has a few nights a week to devote to RP to be able to have meaningful interactions.

As to the small group stuff. Meh. I've seen coteries and packs work fine- but players may need a little assistance finding one. That means you've gotta be pushing players towards each other, and I don't see that happening on WoD games. Ever. People just sit with their gazillion alts in the OOC rooms and wait for PRPs. I don't think that culture works and I don't think there will be a successful WoD game unless it tackles that culture.

@wildbaboons said in Miami, Blood in the Water:

@coin said in Miami, Blood in the Water:

I'll be surprised if the game doesn't plummet precipitously after this.

Eh.. I'll be surprised if it does.

Most MUers either a) haven't heard of MSB b) don't follow MSB c) won't care anyways

There's also a lack of currently open places to go (although several in the works)

@faraday said in How to Change MUing:

I think Firan proved that there's a market for such a thing. For me personally though it holds negative interest. If I want farming and mobs and random mission generation, I'll go play a MMO. I play MUs for the collaborative storytelling. Code, in general, hinders storytelling more than it helps.

I think the little side missions and things to do can actually add to a game if their designed in a way that they push players towards each other. I couldn't care less about having the prettiest coded dress or making sure I get all my prayers/praises/disses in each week.

@surreality said in How to Change MUing:

I like the 'idle time fillers' a lot -- provided they aren't creating such a huge benefit that people feel they have to engage in them to keep up.

This is why I left Arx in a nutshell. Lots to love about that game, but there were just so many little things to do and it felt if you weren't doing them you weren't really involved, and I never had the willingness/ability to check all of the boxes every week/day.

Little stuff to get people out and moving around and bumping into each other on grid is a plus for the people who enjoy it. It just shouldn't be a necessary thing, because then it turns into a grindy obligation.

Also yes. A little something to get people on the grid bumping into each other could be really beneficial, I think.

My great uncle passed during the night. He was a great big bear of a man with a southern accent and the last time I saw him a few months back, he seemed as vigorous as ever.

Right before Christmas, all his kids began posting pics of him on FB - this is never a good sign. I messaged to see what was up and turns out he was feeling a little tired this fall and so went to the doctor. The test results were not good. He had a fast-growing cancer. Nothing to be done. Just a matter of time. etc. etc. etc.

One of his daughters lives in Germany and didn't make it back in the 16 days it's been since diagnosis.

Fuck cancer.

@Ghost said in City of Shadows:

2. I need renown 5 for this one gift, and if I get that gift and apply it to my other skills and merits I can do parkour ninjustu with a claymore and ride a motorcycle in full blown Crinos form. So fuck it, let's check those renown boxes off.

#2 is why these games got in the habit of making players to through hoops for renown. Some players want the dots more than they want to earn/justify them.

#2 is avoidable with low/slow XP games. Most of the complaints that players have about WoD are fixable by putting the breaks on XP. WoD, like many RPGs, goes off the rails at a certain XP level. That's fine when in a TT setting when you have STs that can cater to that XP level, but it really isn't healthy in a MU.

I'm a personal believer in requiring story development to justify the deeper dots on a character sheet. This requires ST oversight, which is something that's very important to the system(s) <oWoD, nWoD, v5>. Unfortunately, the more distanced STs and staff get from whats going on ICly, especially given dozens of players at a time, this gets more difficult.

I'm fine with needing stories/backgrounds if those stories/backgrounds etc come into play on-grid. But when you have to write pages of text, the only purpose of which is approval of a single stat or character sheet, and then it's never touched on again, that seems a bit excessive.

Granted, I don't play werewolf, It's not my thing, so I don't know how renown usually works out on grid. I just know what usually happens with the notes/bgs/justifications that I tend to write, which is nothing.

@magee101 said in NOLA 2: Back in the Vieux:

@lisse24 The difference between a game like Arx which is a custom game, and a WoD game is that WoD is a tabletop rpg system. The "tools" for creating fun in the game as designed by the game is found in ghe rulebooks and only requires a go-ahead by staff that whatever id thematic and in keeping with the ideals of the game. Games like Arx are not using a tabletop system and thus create tools because otherwise they would have none

That is kinda what I'm saying. WoD mu's need more than what is in the book, because the books were written for tabletop games and, now, stay with me ...A MU is not a tabletop game.

I mean, yeah, if you approach every new player you meet with 'Hi. I'm Steve. What's your name?" It will be boring.

If you try to think up an intriguing situation, or if you create a character that is interesting to interact with. Also, I think this goes back to pacing in that having a meeting where you reveal, through your chars dialogue what the char is all about, yeah, that's boring. You don't even have to tell a char your PCs name. Yes, I am looking at you @Ganymede, Mr. Auf der Schmermerter.

@Coin I've been playing with the idea of a peer-confirmed process. So you complete an asp, it publishes to the room, people then confirm that it happened or not.

This would:
a) Take staff mostly out of the equation and make it more automatic
b) Increasing overall use of the system by reminding those players that tend to forget about asps that they exist and they should be fulfilling them
c) Feeding player creativity and empowerment by exposing them to a wide variety of potential asps that would serve as inspiration.

Could this be abused? Sure. Anything could be abused, but I think we design for the game and players we want and then deal quickly and harshly with those who try to game the system.

@magee101 I don't play Arx either, for much the same reason. It's just Too Much and I, being the lazy RPer that I am, don't want to spend half my RP time reading journals and running random code, but neither do I want to spend half my RP time randomly paging people hoping to get a pick up for RP on a sandbox game.

Here's the problem with saying that TT mechanics are sufficient for a MU:

In a tabletop game, you have 1 ST for every 5 or so players, and that ST both provides the story and gives players a reason to interact. You do not have that on a MU. IMO, long lasting, successful games look at:
1 - Why and how players will interact and
2 - In the absence of STs, where does the story come from

You do not need to go full MUD. You do not need to code a bunch of Stuff. But you do need to provide some sort of bridge that allows the existing rules and environment to transfer into a MU environment.

@WTFE said in The Metaplot:

No, the problem is when staff makes a metaplot so intrusive you can't escape it. And, indeed, when you try to escape it or avoid it they go out of their way to make sure that the plot follows you around.

Example from a pathological MU*: Castle Marrach. There was once a metaplot on that. (It withered on the vine for many reasons, but in my time there it was active. If you want to call what was happening "action".) At one point in the metaplot, the consort of the queen (whose name I've forgotten because it doesn't fucking matter), who was somewhat of a weather mage, got into a foul mood and it got reflected in the weather. Players were expected to jump through the hoops to find out why Lord Foulweather (not his real name, duh!) was upset and do something to soothe him. Since, however, most people didn't even really know Lord Foulweather existed, and those who knew he existed knew next to nothing about him besides that, this plot was met with a joint, loud yawn from everybody except the five players who routinely got plot bones handed to them to gnaw on. (And who were actually in a position IC where they could even go to where plot-fu was happening.) The rest just ignored the occasional weather emits.

This is actually my problem with metaplot, in how they're most often used to describe happenings on a game - they're inaccessible. They usually deal with high-end powers and politics that only a few get to interact with on a meaningful level. It's not really fun sitting on the sidelines and watching the same 5-10 chars do all the things. This is why I'm not really fond of hierarchical power structures on games, because everything naturally flows upwards and very few things flow back down again.

I'm all for creating a continuous and interconnected world where players actions matter, however I believe that plot should be driven from the ground up, and derive from how players interact with the world and complications set in front of them, rather than the top down.

I hate ending phone calls. Especially business phone calls. It's five minutes of, "Yes, it was so great hearing from you! I definitely want to continue this discussion. I'm so glad you reached out! I'll look forward to seeing that info."

Can we, like, just hang up already?

I love this idea.

@tat said in Alternative Formats to MU:

@faraday said in Alternative Formats to MU:

I have no philosophical objection to breaking out chat and RP into a separate stand-alone client, though there's a ton of work involved there when you account for all the different platforms. What I object to is expecting people to learn all these game-specific +-commands with crazy syntaxes.

Yeah, this is basically what I want to see, and where I think the barrier to entry is for people. Hell, I've been MU*ing for nearly twenty years (dear lord), and I STILL look up the syntax for how to reply to a bb or add a job to a certain category. And I HATE doing it every single time.

Give me GUI. Give me dropdown menus and submit buttons and edit buttons and reply buttons.

Re: grids, I think there's an interesting question to be asked about what counts as a 'grid' on a non-telnet game. I've actually had this conversation a lot with people. What are the key components? Is it being able to 'walk' from room to room? Is it being able to look from one room to another? Is it a sense of where things are located? Is it the descs?

I'd be happy with a clickable map with descriptions and have no need for 'walking'. But I also feel super strongly that I need both location orientation and descs. Some people have different requirements. But this is a great example of the sort of discussion needed if we really want web-based play, where there are so many possibilities telnet doesn't have.

In my mind, grids serve two purposes: 1 - They provide a sense of space/location that is shared between all the users and 2 - They can promote stumble-upon/random RP (if that is encouraged in the game).

A clickable map probably replaces the one. It probably doesn't even need to be as fine-grained as most grids are. If that map also included a list of players or scenes at that location, like +where does, it might also help with number 2, but I think games in general need a lot of work encouraging players to break out of their cliques and moving to a new format is a great opportunity to rethink things.

@three-eyed-crow I once had someone do this to me and their tragic back story included all sorts of sexual torture, which they described, in detail. I was like nope. Nopenopenope. Done with that character.

@surreality I agree. One is an engaging drop of a backstory the other is ...too much.

Anyway, I didn't mean to imply that all my characters have lengthy or tragic backstories. On RfK both Kara and Mackenzie lived relatively normal lives. Kara embraced her family and lives and sought to make the world better, while Mack was a bit of a rebel. In fact, when I made the first iteration of Cerise way back on TR, her background was very sketchy and it developed over time. She changed from small town girl who didn't quite make good to poor rich girl. My point is more that I have to understand what drives the character, who they are, and their mindset in any circumstance. I have to empathize with them. I struggle to empathize with vampires, even when I have a concept I think is cool.

Watched Chernobyl so I had the taste of Good TV in my mouth before this evening's GoT episode.

First episode is a bit gruesome, but I still highly recommend.

@WildBaboons said in Aesca Sneak Peak:

I think 5-10 players may be a low estimate

Extremely low. I actually see this being quite a popular game.

@arkandel said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

@bobgoblin said in Tools, and not just Beiber.:

Do idle rooms hinder story tellers from being able to tell stories? If a player is going to sit social they'll do it either on the game or somewhere else. But how does that hinder story telling?

The boogyman here is opportunity cost. The theory is that while you're just hanging out chatting OOC - i.e. when there's anything else for you to do that might keep you from being on the grid or responding to a "hey, anyone wanna RP?"-kind of request then it reduces the volume of overall RP on the game.

Although on the surface that's certainly true in practice I don't consider it a major factor.

For starters the distractions offered by an OOC room are laughably small compared to the internet as a whole; I'd be far more likely to be distracted by a Reddit post, a Netflix show or any other kind of addictive video game than a random OOC conversation on a MUSH.

Again, as the person who started this, I completely agree. I believe that chatty OOC Rooms might pull players away from RP and discourage wandering the grid, but they are a smaller part of a larger problem.

I really wish we were discussing ways to encourage players to pursue non-GM driven plot and creating engaging games.

The role that OOC rooms play are very minor and fixating on them isn't helpful. Whether you have them or not is very much a down-the-line decision and should be aligned with the other design decisions you've made for your game.

Little Women trailer is up.

Looks good, but kinda really made me want a Little Women TV series, so you can get into the intricacies of the story. Oh well.

So, given my general dissatisfaction at the moment and inability to actually sink into a game, I've been thinking about this, and my answer is a bit different:

I very much want a game that really emphasizes the relationships between characters and makes them meaningful. The ability to create meaningful, deep relationships between characters is one of the strengths of MUs, IMO.

A lot of games recently have been putting emphasis on PRPs, and while building character relationships and participating in PRPs are not exclusive, I would like to see the same effort put into encouraging player interactions. Personally, I would rather have 1 deep, meaningful scene with another PC than 10 PRPs.