Posts made by Lisse24

@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.

@Gilette said in How to Change MUing:

@Lisse24

I'm only singling you out because you volunteered, and what I'm about to say is probably arising from never working a job where I could login somewhere.

Isn't this a problem? Whenever I log into somewhere and see a WHO list populated by people who've been idle for hours, days, maybe even weeks, I really do start to wonder why they're even online. To me, when I log in, I log in with a purpose: I want to RP very soon.

Couldn't this sort of breed a culture where the idea isn't logging in to play so much as it is just logging in out of habit?

Well, I'm rarely 'idle for hours.' If I'm logged into a game, I'm generally available for RP, and I'll chat with people on channels and such. I just won't sit in public or page people trying to work up a scene (unless I have a pressing concern. If I page you you for RP while I'm working there's a Reason). In other words, I'm there to RP, I'm just putting the onus to be aggressive about it on someone else's shoulders for that period of time.

That being said, yes, seeing a +where full of people sitting alone in rooms, or a mob huddled in the OOC room with no one on grid can be offputting. Arx combatted this by not showing those people. I have mix feelings about this, but that's one way to combat that.

@Rook said in MU Pacing:

Rushing into revealing things is a sure-fire way to make sure that you reach that entropy point faster than you might otherwise. Draw it out, make it last like a nice batch of homemade fudge. Take little bites.

Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about it. Not just with romantic relationships, but with everything. I want to savor what's happening. However, I do get what @Goldfish and @surreality are saying in that it seems if you don't act quick, you can miss the opportunity.

@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.

I've been struggling recently with realizing that my ideal pacing is different than many people's pacing when it comes to MUs. Specifically, I've come up against issues, where players want to go from meeting my char to Sharing All the Things within a scene or two.

Personally, unless there's a reason to speed things up, I like a slow burn. I like slowly discovering and learning about a character with maybe one or two reveals a scene, and then I like time for my character to chew on that mentally and time for other chars to chew on what my char revealed before we come back again.
Same goes for a plot, I want a Thing to happen and then I want plenty of time for my character to RP about it and consider it and make the next move.

However, it seems lots of people want fast moving plots and lots of action. So I'm curious, what do you consider good pacing in MUs and storytelling?

@Kanye-Qwest I did say something along those lines, but I can't find the exact post. I believe it was in the context either of conflict, or maybe new players?

In either case, while I still think it's a good idea, and while it is something that Shav did on RfK that I think really helped to keep conflict positive, I don't think it's necessary for an active game.

I also don't think that checking on how players are doing constitutes as babysitting. (Falling into education analogies here, sorry) If I give my students a worksheet of math problems and then go around the room and do a spot-check on number #10 to make sure they're doing OK, they're still working on their own. I'm not standing over their shoulder and babysitting them while they work, but I'm still able to make adjustments and corrections before things go completely off the rails.

And no, I still don't think short 'how you doing? Anything you need?' conversations are horribly time consuming or prohibitive, but I understand we'll disagree on that until someone actually tries that.

@Tempest I have a game partially written up. I started it as a vamp game, switched to historical, could easily switch back to vamp again. I've stolen and modified systems from RfK, Arx, and other games that I saw work well and retain activity.

But I love creating systems and organizations. I get that from my mother.
I need a coder.
I need someone who is better at plot than I am.

Gany and others have seen bits and pieces of it, but all of their own games their working on.

Hey @Tempest, I feel like @Ganymede and myself are saying the same thing. You don't need a full-time dedicated staffer without a char to run a game like RFK. Yet, you upvoted me and are arguing with Gany. Out of curiosity, are you seeing some nuance in the way that we're wording our answers, and if so, what do you see as being the key difference in them as to what does and doesn't work?

@Ganymede said in How to Change MUing:

@Rook said in How to Change MUing:

1. Narrow the roleplay of all players on the game, giving all characters reason to interact with all others.

On WoD games, the races are segregated because they have different aims. The Reach was a bit different, but every race still has their own power structures and politics. I agree that things should be narrowed, but I believe it should be narrowed to single-race games. That will help keep the setting tight and the tropes relevant.

Meh, I'd allow 2 spheres (+mortals) if the focus was on how the spheres are interacting with each other. Any bigger than that and I'm dubious. I'd point out that this is basically where F&L is right now. Sure, it has spheres besides changeling and vampire, but they're not really active.

@Tempest How would you quantify active?

@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.

I'll admit, I've only skimmed this thread.

I like the idea of players being able to indicate their comfortableness with certain possibilities in a non-confrontational manner.

Like others, I'm unsure about how the light system would be implemented on and used in a MU setting. I can very easily see that being one of those things things that gets coded, people use for a while, and then forget about and it sits quiet and forlorn in a corner. I do think that it'd probably get more use in games with a lot of PRPs/STed events though, so maybe worth consideration there?

I also have seen RP-prefs used other places and generally think it's a good thing to have. Although, I wonder if it's too black and white. As an example, I once told another player, "I don't generally TS and would prefer to FTB," which they interpreted as nothing even remotely sexual ever. I wonder if it might be better to handle this like movie ratings? Everyone knows generally what to expect in a movie. If I say my character prefers a PG-13 level of abuse, and an R level of sexuality, that might give people a better idea of when it's time to FTB, or if they're better off avoiding violence altogether with that G-rated char.

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

@Lisse24 said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

RfK has a lot of goodwill among its former players because it managed to avoid this and give its players plenty to do. However, the people building new WoD still seem to model them after the current games instead of looking at what made games like RfK work or how games in other genres manage to keep players involved.

Please stop bringing up RfK.

No.

Until you can find me a staffer who is going to dedicate 10 hours every single day to RPing NPCs and running plots for everybody on their game. And 5 more hours on that same day handling various +jobs.

I think the consensus is that RfK did a good job at encouraging player interactivity and driving RP that was not dependent on an ST to create engaging stories, but struggled because they did so in a way that required a lot of staff intervention, didn't scale well, and led to staff burn-out in the end. However, just because RfK couldn't scale doesn't mean that there are no lessons to learn. Game creators should be asking themselves if they could possibly innovate on and implement one or more ideas from RfK without it leading to a massive uptick in jobs.

I personally think it's completely possible, but it would require a lot of front-end coding, and there's a lack of coders in this hobby, and so you'd have to get one of them excited about the project.

For Fallcoast, I don't think there's much they could implement this late in the game, but they might try something like eliminating the OOC room, adding cost to maintaining buildings, especially when private, and tying xp to public RP or RP with someone new, or possibly other small nudges that would push people on to the grid and into activity.

@Rook Yes it's an issue. Just look at all the threads discussing various aspects of this.

RfK has a lot of goodwill among its former players because it managed to avoid this and give its players plenty to do. However, the people building new WoD still seem to model them after the current games instead of looking at what made games like RfK work or how games in other genres manage to keep players involved.

Piggybacking on Ganymede, my character and a couple others are taking a stab at making a mortal group that is (mostly) independent and Does Stuff, and seeing how long we can keep that up until we annoy everyone and they decide to deal with us.

If you'd like to get in on that, we'd love to have you! Just contact Danielle or Reese on game.

I'm not generally a member of a clique, so I come into a game on my own. And as I said on another thread, as a person who comes into a game without a pre-made RP group, the ability to locate and find active RP partners, esp. through utilizing an active public grid, makes or breaks a game for me.

On MUs, RP is either accessible or its not, and for the most part, on Fallcoast, it's not. RP happens in temp rooms or private rooms. I need to be able to log into the game and see scenes that I could potentially join while I'm getting my feet under me.

Jerks. Whoever did it is a jerk.
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Lincoln-Memorial-Vandalized-With-Red-Spray-Paint-440565873.html

@Coin Conflict of Interest on a political game can be troubling, as one player attempts to manipulate things to their own advantage. I can also see why what you posted about might be interpreted as potentially squicky by staff, and maybe they'd want to protect you from being pressured into doing something or pressuring someone else? Other than that, I don't see the issue.

@Arkandel Right. I'm entertained and that's all that matters. I burst into applause, as I was sitting by myself, alone in my house, several times this past week, and that's good.

Is there some BS? Sure. But it's nowhere near, say, Walking Dead's level of BS, so I'm fine with it.

@Tyche
Personally, I loved the episode, but as I said elsewhere ... Jon Snow is that annoying MU character who has a leadership position, but still hogs the spotlight in all the PRPs.