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.

The last two WoD games I played both had plots, and both fell into the same pattern described above. Plot is a good beginning, more important is making sure players can connect to that plot, and that there's enough plot to keep wheels spinning, without falling into the "Supernatural" trap of constantly needing bigger and badder as you cycle through various ways to stave off the end of the world.

I have been trying to get a very simple yes/no answer from a coworker for 24 hours now. Every time I bring the subject up, she goes off on a tangent that is only tenuously related and doesn't bring her any closer to answering the original question.

@Jeshin I feel like using video chat instead of voicechat might solve this. I've been considering offering out my Zoom account to my group for this purpose.

My group has always used Fantasy Grounds. I don't know it well from the ST side, but it's pretty customizable for what you need/want.

I'm at my nephew's football game and A) it's freezing and B) the woman next to me keeps talking. She's clearly a parent of a kid on the other team, but there's no one else around her, so I guess she's talking to me, but so have never seen her before and I'm not about to agree with her on the calls.

The first What We Do in the Shadows trailer is out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyZi3rJPENs

Since we're complaining about work, I lose all respect for someone I perceive as being stupid, which is a huge problem when I have to work closely with someone.

Like the coworker who had two, simple questions this morning, both of which could have been answered by reading the title of the file I sent.

I've been watching Legion.

I wish I didn't know it was connected to X-men. It's so, so good, but I'm so burnt on superhero stuff, I cringe every time they use the word 'mutant' or make an illusion to the comics and I think, "That's right. This is going to get stupid and cheesy and become nothing but one senseless action scene after another." It's really keeping me from enjoying the perfection that is that show.

@Kumakun I've been looking at Evennia, mainly because it had enough documentation that I could teach it to myself as someone who's never done that side of MU before. It also had a lot of the features I wanted. I think someone can probably easily go in and tweak ThenoCode for V5, and set up a wiki, and do all that stuff, but that person needs to be going in with a lot more knowledge about MU code than what I have. I know, because I really did give it a shot. That being said, January was hectic for me so I haven't done much by the way of coding.

@skew I dunno, I kind of look at oWoD the same way I look at any TT game system. It really is about the system and I'm gonna plop that down in a world of my own creation. Now, getting players to accept that is a whole different issue and V5's use of loresheets muddy the water even more, and I honestly hadn't decided what I was going to do with them yet.

I assumed V5 was 5th Ed Vampire and voted for it. V5 has the systems in place that you'd want for a MU. Namely, it allows for social combat, territory, influence. I've been (slowly) playing around with a set-up for my own V5 game and would be willing to collaborate/share any of my work.

@derp said in Mage for Multi-Sphere WoDv2 Games:

There is no problem with the system, as is, running on a MU.

The problems that happens with Mage on MU is twofold, but due to a common source:

1. XP is gained far too quickly, leading to multiple high-level characters in a very short amount of time, all of them with competing interests and with enough power that they have no need to work well with others.

2. There is very little in the way of active antagonism or storytelling, as Seers of the Throne and other external threats are almost entirely nonexistent, so they have little choice but to try and get into other active things.

You just need a better class of staffers who recognize that mages need things to do and cannot advance so quickly that working with Orders/Consilium Officials/Other Cabals becomes optional.

I would argue these aren't just problems with Mage. Overbloated XP and lack of Things to Do are problems for any game, it's just that in mage the effects of these issues are greatly exaggerated.

I've been dismissed by doctors enough times in my life that I really should be used to it by now, but I'm not.

Mostly, I'm angry that I've wasted four months and hundreds of dollars on a guy who is objectively a bad doctor with no interest in listening to me or doing any sort of examination beyond blood work.

I'm also very much against tossing a sphere in just because. If you have a faction in a game, you best know why they're in the game and how their players are going to interact with the other factions.

Less is more.

Eh, I like 1E, just sayin. I mean, CoD has some cool stuff going with conditions and all, but I like 1E.

@arkandel said in Good TV:

@kanye-qwest What I begrudge is that the way things are shaping with streaming services starting to fragment we'll back to square one again... basically exactly like cable, but with services like Netflix, Disney, HBO, Amazon etc instead of channels and bundles.

It was great while it lasted to pay $12 and get nearly everything under one interface.

The difference was that when I had cable, I basically had to pay for all the channels or have none of the channels. Now, if I don't want HBO, or Prime, or Hulu, I don't have to buy it.

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

There definitely does. The two biggest hurdles here are 1) People like me that don't want to run stuff, and 2) player-run plots being seemingly immaterial. The former isn't ever going to be solved, as it's not really a problem. We're there to play, not work at a thing, and that's something that just has to be accepted.

The second, however, can be worked at. Many times, in my experience, I've seen player-run plots be basically ignored when it came to the further development of whatever metaplot that's going on. People aren't going to run plots that don't matter.

See, and I was including PRP in the ST-driven scene category.

In any case, I think you solve this issue by giving players something to struggle over. I don't think you need to go as system-heavy as Arx has, but for example, Vampire games can lean into territory and blood scarcity. Games could also make influence spheres more important by giving them some mechanical benefits. Just give players something to spin their wheels against that doesn't require waiting for a third person to run something for them, because I don't care how easy you make running PRPs, it still won't be enough to keep your game going, IMO.

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

2. This is codeable (and has been in different ways): A way to tell what a scene I'm considering joining is about. Is that a meet and greet? A political conversation? A fight scene? Obviously this requires participant buy-in though to update it.

I've proposed in the past integrating this info in the wantrp command. So when you turn wantrp on, you add a sentence or two of the type of RP you'd be up for, and then people scanning the list have a better idea of why they might want to interact with you.

But coding it too, so that when people see RP is happening in a room they know what it's about - that would be great.

3. The carrots need to work. IMHO currently in most MU* they don't. XP should have a purpose - it ought to incentivize the things we want happening on the MUSH; handing it out automatically to everyone is 'fair' but useless.

Games have too mush XP period, but that's grumpy old me speaking.

4. Games relying heavily on themes which involve NPCs need to provide the tools for players to portray those on the fly, consistently and reasonably. For example Werewolf needs spirits - period. There need to be specific, easy to follow guidelines and the culture in place encouraging all players to put some in play even if they're not actively STing (i.e. when their PC is already involved in that scene).

I've debated having an NPC roster so that players can just grab low-level NPCs and use them for quick scenes and such.

5. More reasons should be offered to meet with and involve other players, especially new ones. Arx did an admirable job of that and other games haven't picked up on it; from being handed XPs just for RPing with them, or with random other players, to sharing clues and learning secrets, this really helps integrate newcomers instead of having them idle then stop logging on for lack of anything to engage with.

This, though, is the crux of game design. There needs to be a middle scene between the ST-driven scene and pure social RP. The game needs to have something for the players to do that doesn't rely on them waiting for a GM to hand them something.

It's all fine and good to say that players should be proactive, but when you give them nothing to be proactive about and no tools to be proactive with, what do you expect other than idling?

@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.

@tyche said in Back in my day....:

Eating tide pods is pretty minor stuff.
The current fad of young people mutilating their bodies is beyond sad.

What fad is this? Something worse than tide pods?