Posts made by Lisse24

@saosmash said in New Player Onboarding:

I feel like we've done a fair to decent job of this on TLF (Transformers Lost and Found) by a.) "Hiring" dedicated staff for the purpose and b.) getting brand spanking new player input on building easy cheat sheets for other brand spanking new newbies to use figuring out MUSH. It helped a lot because we've all been doing this shit so long we felt myopic about what exactly newbies really need to know to figure out the interface (sorry, as I type this I realize I'm crossing the streams again).

I have to admit that I'm really, really curious. What are some of the things that new players found confusing that you maybe didn't expect?

I got in a discussion earlier today with a friend about how games integrate new players. I expressed frustration that it seemed like many games seemed to put all the expectations to find out information on the new player, who often had to navigate between +help and wikis and chargen rooms to find out basic starting information. And for all this effort, the only thing that is guaranteed is that the player has read information, not that they've comprehended or internalized or that they become a regular player.

So I'm wondering, has anyone seen a game do a really good job at making sure that new players get integrated? If not, what do you think games should be doing to welcome new players?

@ThatGuyThere said in Meta vs PrP vs Planning vs Impromptu:

@Thenomain said in Meta vs PrP vs Planning vs Impromptu:

We have no "Mushlike" way to enable this, and no matter what you do, the pose will be removed from the action. I would be happy if combat scenes had no posing and allowed table-talk, aka OOC, for the interaction.

Honestly I would likely be happy with this. I am also happy with what I have seen done on a couple of occasions and that is do all the tolling first to determine who wins and to what degree and difficulty then posing out the whole thing.
But not every one in the medium is a table top gamer, so think round of mechanics round of pose is a good middle ground to have be the standard.

I think that I would probably, honestly, end up modifying this. Why not have everyone state their intent for the round OOC, roll, and then have the GM make a summarizing pose?

@Admiral said:

Alright. The 'solution' the bosses came up with? No punishment for her, no legal ramifications. Instead she gets to come into work two hours later every day and I don't have to see her.

I am... of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand? Yay, safe. They won't be threatening me anymore.

On the downside? This killed my 'promotion' I was supposed to be getting. Also she gets rewarded by not having to work so early.

And I was told if I file a lawsuit against her, I'm fired. This is Texas, so yes. They can do that.

That's awful. Ugh. So sorry:(

I hate the fact that I can't have a different opinion of how to do something, or offer an unvoiced viewpoint without couching it in a million different conditionals, lest I be seen as 'difficult' and 'intimidating.'

I hate the fact that even though I'm a highly educated individual with an area of expertise that none of my coworkers have, I'm basically expected to be an automaton and produce exactly what my coworkers would, if only they had more time.

Maybe we should spin this into it's own thread, but to weigh in, my main issue with closing off public RP, is that it makes it very hard on newcomers. I know this has been said before, but we are a dying hobby and anything we can do to make it easier on a newbie player to find RP, we should do. Why? Because if they actually find and like RP, they'll stick with the hobby longer, which means the hobby will be healthier and we'll all be happy.

I also don't think it's inherently bad to have your private scene interrupted. If I can take my scene from this morning as example:

My character and another char on BITN just figured out that we both knew about supernatural stuff. We wandered from a cafe onto the UMD Mall, where there was an idle player. We continued to play, but invited the player to join. Now, he was idle, so he didn't, but what if he had? Would that have changed the tenor of our scene? Of course. We would have been stopped before actually confirming that we were both saying what we thought we were. That would have led to several days of us both wondering. Would this have been bad? Well, I don't think there is bad in RP. I think there is just different. Our scene would have been different and would have led in a different direction, but I am confident that we could have made something interesting of it.

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

Not RL, but...

I found a newbie on a MU and he is a good newbie. Despite playing on his first MU ever, he has great poses, has a good grasp of the system, reads files and the wiki, and has been great about checking in about RP boundaries and the like.

I want to hug him and squeeze him and name him George (and tie him to the mux so that he doesn't leave the hobby).

As always, my anger is induced by my extremely dysfunctional workplace. Specifically, the new vp, who has absolutely zero respect for my professional judgment, training, or experience. He likes to tout that he has so much respect for his workers and that he gives them so much autonomy. Not being able to send an email without his say so is pretty much the opposite of autonomy.

So, I sit twiddling my thumbs all day because 6 years of schooling and 15 years in the workplace is work jackshit.

@faraday said:

I strongly dislike places code. If you're going to do places, you might as well just be in separate MUSH rooms. Less obtrusive. But I haven't seen a lot of trouble with people making and managing their own sub-groups naturally, even when they're in the same room.

But yes, in general I agree with the rest of it and would add:

Skip the fluff. Summarize boring parts in a "moving right along..." type pose. Weddings are a prime example of this (OMG how I hate wedding scenes). One round of poses can summarize most - if not all - of the ceremony.

Start poses with your name instead of an emit. It makes it a lot easier to see who's doing what and keep track of the smaller sub-groups. Setting up a client-side highlighter for your character name can also help you avoid missing people talking to you.

Keep it moving. If you're the organizer and someone's holding things up, take charge. Pose around them. Don't let things stall or you'll have a lot of bored and frustrated players on your hands.

I couldn't disagree more. Places for large scenes are something that I consider essential. Perhaps I should say extra-large in that I mean 10+ people. Places serve several very valuable functions including keeping non-essential spam out of most people's screens. They also allow me to hold a side scene, which is what keeps me from totally zoning out.

Other than places, I think removing the necessity of less-essential PCs to pose helps to keep things flowing. Especially if its a scene where servants/ghouls/etc. may be included mainly just to make sure they're in the loop. Asking them to come up with a reaction pose every round is a bit much, nor should they have to wait a round to lean in and whisper to their master/husband/best-friend etc. some bit of special information.

OOC organization, like what Mietze did is also a great facilitator especially for uber-huge business meetings.

Finally, I always highlight my name client side along with the name of immediate family/packs/coterie mates/etc. It helps me know when I should be focusing on what's being said instead of zoning out.

@Pyrephox said:

Hee. That one doesn't lay at your feet. I got Real Lifed before the game closed!

And thank you, @Lisse24 - who were you?

Man, you're asking me to remember character names? Bah. But, I believe you knew me as Kara

Aw! Don't say "not distinguished!" I only ever played with Paige, but loved doing so.

Ashes to Ashes - that's the game!

I've remembered it vaguely, but couldn't remember what it was called. Don't expect me to remember my character or anything about them.

@Groth said:

Most of the systems (Boons, status, influence, feeding, beats etc) were relatively easy to maintain, the system that would have to be redesigned is the system for taking over and managing territory. The problems that became obvious as time went on was partly that time became an unlimited resource as the characters grew in XP (Actions per week should probably not scale), dogpiling became the way to get territory once territory got scarce (Teamwork should be sharply limited) and having every territory disruption handled manually by staff requires way to much work(Something more automated by code would be more manageable).

I think that probably the problem with territory was more numbers. I'd like to keep the system mainly as it was, including the staff involvement. Especially in a political game, territory is going to be the main thing that is driving everything else. What I would do, is make thresholds higher and severely limit what characters could do. I would probably trash DT, which seemed fiddly and confusing and replace it with a much more streamlined "action" system, where vampires got 1 action per week and ghouls got 2. Actions could be defensive, (i.e., I'm protecting my hold on this territory above and beyond normal defenses) or offensive (I'm going to try and obtain status 3 in infrastructure, or I'm going to investigate <blah>).

One of the problems that I saw with Kingsmouth that really made it hard on players and characters alike was that it just moved too fast. At the same time, I've heard several former players say things like, "I never rolled anything." So there was a lot going on for some people to the extent that they didn't have enough time to do everything and staff struggled to keep up with them and others didn't have much going on at all. It seems like any derivative game will want to put the breaks on for everyone and make sure that actions are more equitably distributed.

I think that's a good point. One of the things that made RfK successful was that it was a highly focused game. It had a single sphere, and only allowed one alt per player. The game may have had a plot, but it was about Political Interplay, and the game was focused around making that work.

Many of the games that I see out there now seem to be less focused. They have multiple spheres and don't seem to have systems in place to foster the type of RP that they're looking for. To be fair, I have little hands-on experience at the moment other than Fallcoast and RfK.