Posts made by Misadventure

This thought is prompted by seeing games (live plays as well as text descriptions) where revealing the internal details of characters, and even whole plots is common.

My feeling is that MU* RP is more about finding out in the moment, seeing something unexpected, a surprise, a creation in the next bit of text. I also recall folks who dislike MU* RP having such info in it.

So perhaps consider for 2-3 familiar players, MU* in general, and some for of table-top where the players are decently familiar with one another.

How important is it to you to be able to, or not have to, explain your character's thinking, emotions etc to a table of RPers?

How do you feel about others doing to when you are at the table?

How about the GM describing the NPCs actions?

On a similar vein, how interesting/important is it to you to be able to keep secrets from the other players - meaning whatever it is, it is never discussed in front of them until it's revealed in game fiction?

Same again for other players at the table?

Same again for the GM and their NPCs?

Someone I spoke to about this also brought up character betrayal. Everything from minor theft, to relatively small working at counter purposes, to full on setting characters up to take a hit.

I myself have never seen that on a MU* where it wasn't really a player using IC lies to cover for OOC lies.

@Macha certainly.

You discussed having her actual image used in association with the character and their fiction. (even if you never did use it)

@Macha Probably.

I wonder what the world (would) think of mixing real life people via AI. Is it the same as mixing in real life artwork, which I personally see as theft (mathematical alterations of input), or are peoples ' actual appearance feel different for some reason?

Not something I'd care to discuss here though.

I will say it is too much to ask that players alone or even collectively pay a dollar a day to subscribe to MidJournney just to make an image for a MU*.

Just a rando occurrence - was reading an author's blog and they had links to their own MidJourney created character images. They seem familiar to me, but I am exposed to a lot of AI character art in passing.

https://rddsmith.com/character-images/

I have many vague reasons to share this: they sorta remind me of real life actors, the images still look like paintings to me, serendipity, etc.

PS: @faraday just being reminded that there are people who can't visualize characters from text is enough for me to say if I were the head of a text based RP game I would be okay with PBs.
You'd think I would remember this since I have family and friends who have the same experience.
I'd still put images behind a spoiler tag or similar.

Glad that was worked out.

@Derp I don't call it a writing hobby. No one has.

Not doing something you don't like doesn't shield you from others doing it. For a collaborative thing that's going to be a difficulty.

Ghost in on about a legal or at least reasoned question about PBs.

I personally know how to block what is sent to my computer from MU* and wikis, so I can take care of my own interests, if I had them.

Or are you saying that my feeling that my imagination is overwritten and I don't like it is something I do wrong and should change my experience?

So far got lots of disagree but not much reasoning shared about the question put out there.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I often want a pop up video style trivia and details for shows about everything. Learning is engaging.

@hobos I would say that Played Bys seem to refer to real people portraying the character, like a show or film credit.

Original artwork, and even artwork for characters who are mainly portrayed as art (comics, manga, anime, video games, animation, artwork in books) doesn't have a real person to portray the character.

Text based RP is certainly a long way away from deepfakes.

Depicting crimes in text is not illegal in the US as far as I know, unless it's a serious how to where specific information like actual models of security systems, software details etc are included. Even then - it's not illegal to point out a security weakness in known systems.

I'm mainly curious as to why one real world attribute matters, when another doesn't seem to. But again, nothing's going to change. If I were to run a MU* and decide I didn't want PBs, I would just make that policy and if asked why answer "because that's how I want it."

@ZombieGenesis
This is not why traffic dropped here. The people who left had plenty of judgement etc going on with some individuals. It doesn't matter really, as none of it is going to change.

What did you all think of the argument that underage images equals child abuse sexual materials when paired with textual sexual situations? (The examples were l when the person was 16-17 if I recall correctly, not like 5 or 10).

If that has merit, can you articulate what the difference is? Maybe because it's representing what would be a legal action? Or there isn't a strong evidence of someone being a creeper about that particular person, while there are lots of sexual predators online, extending to real world or not? I mean, I think people would be creeped out if someone was coming across as a serious stalker of the person and RPing as a version of them.

Just curious about people's feelings or thinking.

@Ghost
As a preference, I don't like photos for PB's, especially using well known faces. I find it overwrites the imagination. May as well desc as "You see someone who looks like but definitely isn't <celebrity name> in <source of image>."

However, I suspect by linking it to TS is an argument that will not gain agreement, despite that some have argued that PBs of people when they were underage equates to child sexual abuse material if that player then engages in text based sexual content.

About the best you could hope for is either a spoilers tag on images in a wiki, or add your own filter to avoid the PBs if that's possible.

@faraday said in [Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?]

The key is to design systems that support your goals.

Yes.
My perception is I have played on a lot of MU's where death was the zero HP option for combat, yet that doesn't seem to be the goal, so what else could game designers do with the topic, and would MU* RP work with whatever this new approach was?

If saying zeroing out some resource (health, willpower, patience, public support, whatever) is the better choice that death or complete failure, why aren't MU*s explicit about that goal?

Or is this really in the realm of no player cares in the least, so you may as well just throw whatever makes them think they know what to expect from the "system" and not bother?

What happens when you "lose" in FS3?

Also, MU*s M U asterisk S is formatting as italic per typical markup, which I don't recall it doing before.

I agree that player behaviors can be a pain. Players can ruin any setup, or make any but the most extreme setup work. You can't system that way,

@ZombieGenesis said in Is MU* RP slanted towards player success?:

If the question is, why do we track points that are just a track to inevitable success? Then the answer is that it doesn't need to be a track to inevitable success. Failure can advance RP and drama, too(often more than success).

This is what all systems do currently.

Every MU* I have played on, the system has been used. BUT the ST sets up what is faced and how events evolve, players avoid things where it looks really challenging even if they think there is a tacit understanding they won't lose characters. Combined, that is the "mechanism" by which this inevitable success trend seems to happen.

My question is if a literal countdown to death (that never comes) or to success is rigged towards player success, maybe it would be a better use of system engagement time to have something that spent more effort suggesting WHAT the drama/complications/dilemmas are.

Or maybe it's all too much effort for the gain, atop that players often sabotage such things.

I was reading Upwind, an RPG based around fantastical airships in a late 1800s like setting. It leans very far towards players and GMs defining fictional stakes as a group creation and negotiation, then resolving which set off events happens.
(If anyone wants to see what that looks like, I can post an example from the book)

Here is part of a boxed comment they made:

"It is tacitly understood in most RPGs that the players usually ultimately achieve their primary goals. Every good adventure has setbacks and challenges, but in the end the characters typically succeed. Accordingly, like the mechanics of most games, Q is biased toward player success."

(Q is the name of their game system).

I agree with the statement. There are games designed otherwise, and certain any given group of players can play most games as a survival simulation.

I don't think MU* RP is that way very often. Yes, there are games where PVP is encouraged, and more powerful players are allowed to kill off less power characters straight out of chargen and so on.

Yet even those games typically have people who like continuity of story and character growth and affecting the setting.

So - the shortest version of this question I can offer is why do we track hit points if we don't want combat to kill player characters?

Could we do something else? Spend effort on something else that creates drama, suspense, satisfaction, whatever??

Make some sort of procedure that limits fatality, or anything that makes a character deeply less able to RP?

Note that this question of tracking a number, like gathering successes for a goal, is the same. HP are just more immediate and concrete an example.

@faraday those are great examples.

I've seen games where the players really are fully going to make up something like a new species and or a new culture with little to no detail, but usually that means there will be a brainstorming moment where the players define at least some of the ideas, enough for folks to get going, but also with the understanding that the act of creation by the group is more important than any defined sense of where it is going.

In other words, it literally is a bad idea to make plans or defined content of any kind that remains out of player knowledge.

=============================

My personal approach as an ST is to definitely have structure to what HAS happened, and to how NPCs will continue to act. Then the players act on that, and we see where it goes, though the typical motivator is something needs to be stopped in the near future and that moment of crisis is essentially the decision point and end of the story.

I would like to think that players would want to suggest NPCs, relationships and events, and either create them or submit the general idea to the play group or an ST, etc. For all that it's good to have an organizing and creative authority, it seems like there is room to make things in the game and utilize player creativity. Maybe even just suggestions of things they'd like to see for their character, other players characters, and the setting and story at large.

@faraday is that unsettling feeling because you can't ask questions and explore the situation and whatever lore you might have access to, or that enough information isn't presented in most challenges or something else?

@Ganymede the point is most players and most play I saw after that did not include the players failing. Likewise, not everyone thinks as you do, or enjoys as you do.

I think that should these things should be a conscious stance and not something that isn't stated or acknowledged.

Whatever the position is with these various approaches, if they are acknowledged they can be leaned into to create a better experience.

EG if you are aiming for PC failure and fatality to be a thing, maybe working on fast or character generation or personal; player stables or pre-gens to jump right back in helps. Maybe communicating better about what's expected in terms of character ability requirements or player questions for information will help.

A mismatch of expectations only leads to suckitude.

Intent -> All Players Expectations-> Game System Design -> ST Communication

Or maybe players will never actually put the effort in, and it may as well be diceless and failless. But then how would the insider clique know they are better than everyone else?

@Ganymede said in MU* Mystery RP:

I don't think it needs to get any more complicated than that.

It diesnt need to be. However, STs are often in short supply or have no "authority" on games, so an approach where you can upstep a player, or a player-ST's ability to spark and resolve a scene/storyline without as much preparation or reliance on staff (game authority) might be useful.

I definitely encounter folks who really prefer to come to the right answers, risk on the right actions - to make choices without knowing exactly how they will come out.

And I definitely encounter folks who do fine with there being no failures or costs they don't suggest.

On MU*s, I most often I encountered make work +jobs towards automatic success with a few or no points of choice that really affected the outcome.

My example is waaaay back when Peverel had a Duchess(?) be poisoned despite the players efforts. And I am not sure the players really had a chance to learn about the poison or the plot before hand. Assuming they did, the players missed all of it.

So if Staff don't want to present choices with consequences, they wouldn't always have to "act like a storyteller".

Or they could focus on what the crucial story decision points they create are and go from there.

Mystery: where is the spoiler function???

Another angle to look at it is this:
Does a story creator lay out what is happening
OR
Does someone suggest an event or situation and the players make up how it goes?

Excessive examples, trying to get away from actual mystery and more into an as yet unknown set of actions that are likely to succeed:

Gm says there is a locked door, a chasm to cross, and a riddle based on murals in the rooms before and after the chasm. The GM lists lock picking, a movement type skill check, and perception checks as likely solutions. Being reasonable, they will also accept typical ways around each obstacle like teleport, flying, eidetic memory, lore skills, etc.

VS

The GM says there is a cleverly difficult set of tests between the players and their goal. They players then decide that there is a very difficult and trapped, locked door that leads into a set of rooms that goes nowhere. Another player suggests that hidden in these rooms is a mechanism that makes it possible to open/reveal the real door a distance away from the one they came through, so going in is still necessary. Someone says it was known there was a key to this difficult door, and it might be safer to try to find or reconstruct this key in a side scene. And that's just to get to the physical-bravery challenge ...

Another example:

GM says an enemy raiding force of some strength is threatening the city. GM decides they are crafty, and send small bands to harry people on the three routes but they know a really less known way and are moving their main force quietly through there and hope that some troops are out chasing the retreating small bands, and the main force arrives unexpectedly, they will likely take some important ground/fortifications and the situation is dire.

The players may have rolls like warfare, or scouting, or backwoods lore that they could roll to know about the possible use of the back way, or the GM could decide that the players get to decide how they allocate their forces.

VERSUS

The GM says a large raiding force is on its way, maybe even establishing what sort of force in terms of culture and technology. After that the players decide how the attack happens, and create scenes that produce the drama, tragedy, loss, and courageous sacrifices that make a good war tale. Maybe they go with the hidden attack route, but decide that there are no distraction attack bands, and ultimately scouts will report back that they didn't see an army, except those who encounter the army and likely are ambushed, but we can play that out, and either they return with the news, or the fact they didn't is the warning needed.

Players could also be suggesting rolls and letting the results vary up what happens, including adding details to justify a result, like oh there should be a lore check to see if we think of all the hidden ways, and no we failed that roll, but no one will forget that high valley that should be snowed in as a route, so maybe there are forgotten tunnels through the mountains.

@faraday

My parallel story of sympathy:

For a tabletop RPG:

I tried to communicate a basic structure for organizing an investigation along the lines of the Clue board game, adding in the basic journalist questions and a generic list of types of sources of information like the media, subject matter experts, NPCs they've met with prior experience in a topic - especially any that have been already named in the setting, or specifically the given storyline.

I had a personal mystery arise for a player to give them a persona storyline
They brainstormed a list of the seven likely causes from specific things to generic

They investigated six, declared it unsolvable.

The seventh? Their background nemesis, whom* they betrayed in the area of the current situation.

So, I feel ya.

*trying out using whom, no idea if it's right.

@ZombieGenesis said in MU* Mystery RP:

I handle this in one of two ways in the games I run. These are generally used for GMless RP as most of the people I RP with use Ares and asynchronous RP.

1: I've set up a plot where the story can be advanced by completing a number of scenes. I provide a page with a number of prompts and some hidden information for when certain benchmarks have been met. When the players meet those benchmarks, they reveal the hidden information and RP accordingly. One scene leads to the next(scene prompt, action prompts, clue prompts, scene close) until the mystery is solved.

Could you elaborate on this part? Is this information hidden in the sense the characters won't know it until they choose the right actions/make the right rolls, but at least one player does know the info OOC? Or is it somehow hidden in another way? Like players submit the right rolls, the answer is unlocked from a +jobs queue type thing?

GENERAL NOTE
Mysteries are a convenient way of talking about this sort of thing, but I do hope I am being clear that I think this sort of thinking applies to just about every kind of story situation. What actions have the expectation (from the story maker and the participating players) of making progress towards resolving whatever in the way the players and their characters would prefer.