The worst thing I've ever done as staff anywhere was not inform people OOC that they were heading into a situation with the potential for a severely negative outcome for their character (including death), and then ignore them when they would become upset that their character was suddenly dead or missing a limb or in extreme debt to a mafia boss.
Inquiring minds want to know:
What is PillowFort?
I vaguely recall making a character on Denver and then forgetting my password before ever playing with them and just never returning. (I have issues.)
I blew up a building because I was OOCly bored that it was the primary IC hangout for most people. I specifically waited until it was empty of people, as I didn't want to kill any characters.
My only thoughts in this particular bit of stuff are:
I do agree that Derp was out of line in the Current Events thread.
I do agree that The Hog Pit is very much not the place to bring issues with an admin to Gany or the rest of the admins. I think maybe that should be handled in PMs, or perhaps in a different category of MSB, since not everyone on MSB wants to be a part of The Hog Pit, and shouldn't be forced to be part of the Hog Pit to address issues with the people that spend their free time and not free money making sure we have MSB.
I may actually check this out once you get to where you're taking character applications. I do thoroughly enjoy Shadowrun, and I bought Anarchy when it came out, but haven't had a chance to see how it is in play yet.
@solstice said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:
I think of min-maxing your character's specialization as a pretty organic way of telling a given character's story.
There's a big difference between making a character who is competent at their specialization and min-maxing in my book. Min-maxing is the difference between being competent and world class.
For example, I am a competent swimmer. Michael Phelps is min-maxed for swimming.
My opinion is that Min/Max is only good or bad based on the decisions of the particular group you are with.
I've had fun in groups where Min/Maxing was declared the standard at the start of play, and I've had fun in groups where Min/Maxing was strictly limited or just flatly banned.
I think if your group is all on board with it, it's fine. It's those situations where the group is trying to play one way and a single player is going the other that causes frustration, in my opinion.
I had another idea to run a game set in a time loop where character death was pretty regular, and each character's timeline (all major events from approval to death) would be thoroughly recorded.
During each loop, the events already established would play out, unless actions were taken that would definitively change what the involved characters were doing.
Then I realized that the amount of work that would require would burn out 10 MUs worth of staff faster than a moonshine fire.
I am not aware of any MUs that have used any edition of UA. I would suggest researching 2e over 3e for a MU because character generation in 3e is done as a group and some of the mechanics in 3e would fall apart rapidly due to character turnover that MUs usually experience.
Ooh. I got another one.
A small town Unknown Armies game where hokey small time magic users in the early 1980s fight over control of the mundane population like feudal lords.
I (likely in the same vein as many of you) would love to make all manner of new MUs, but since I lack the coding ability and time, will never make anything.
More specifically, I would love to make a zombie apocalypse MU, where I secretly keep count of the remaining population of humans on earth (which would be a depressingly low sub 1000 number), and each time a PC (or NPC human dies), the population number goes down by one. Once the population number reached the total number of living PCs and NPCs, character generation closes for the remainder of the game. Once we get down to just a handful of PCs & NPCs left, we have one final scheduled event where the story comes to an end (most likely a dark one, or at least one with the PCs going out in the blaze of glory taking as many walking corpses with them as they can).
@three-eyed-crow Oh yeah, like, really the only thing you can do is plaster the important stuff in as many places as you can and pray that the majority of people read it. Then you just get to hope that the people who don't read any of it aren't so selfish as to assume their OOC interpretation of how the game is run is correct.
So I had a thought on the original post (which I am posting without reading the entire 12 pages of this thread) and it goes something like:
I've seen many many cases in my many many years of RPing online (both in MUs and bboards and stuff), that there are always players who ignore all or most of the OOC information on the game and its related sites (beyond can I play character X type information), and that often includes details on how Staff approaches the game (availability, GMing style, preferred plot types, and so on), and then these players who ignore the available information will get upset when the game does not work the way they think it should, and throw fits, run PRPs specifically for the purposes of detracting from others play, and all manner of other bad behavior, all because they didn't bother to read the readily available OOC information on the game (again, beyond what they needed to read to make sure they could get their character approved).
And yes, there are definitely people who have staffed places who completely ignored everything their players told them OOCly in an effort to connect and tell a story everybody was invested in, so it's a two way street.
I'm not sure how to actually combat this phenomenon because it's specifically related to people just not going the extra mile to see how things fit together on a specific game. Maybe work on slapping that info on the front page of the game's website somewhere, or a big link to it. I dunno.
Can anyone think of a game that had or has a really good way of making sure players see that type of information fairly quickly (and even fairly often)?
Sorry if this is a rehash of previous stuff.
@misadventure Being that a lot of those factions use racism and other -isms to ply terror and fear into their victims, I'd still say no to that idea.
@jennkryst I honestly hope the super-ebil factions of the WOD are never opened for playable PCs in any future WOD MU*s that may exist. They are fine and dandy as ultra-monstrous antagonists, but fuck letting people play them as PCs.
I think it would be cool to figure out a way to link a MU codebase to MegaMek.
The only message board system I've actually managed in the past was Vanilla Forums. It's nice, but I discovered pretty quickly it's geared more towards corporate support forums rather than anything that might be useful to MSB.
@arkandel said in The Desired Experience:
One of the fundamental issues with MU*ing has to do with getting everyone on the same page. In short - it's impossible.
I agree, and I think one of the biggest things you can do to work around this is to find where everyone's pages overlap, and work to make those bits stand out. You might not be hitting everything for any single person, but you're tagging enough pieces of stuff that people do like that everyone is getting something out of it.
Just my opinion, of course.
