Best posts made by Ominous

I feel like MUs don't give enough detail on what the majority views of NPCs are, especially on L&L servers. What beliefs do they have? What's their day to day life look like? What cultural norms do they expect to be adhered?

Are commoners expected to rise from their seats and offer a bow when even the lowest of nobles enters the room? When the king/queen/emperor/empress shows up are they supposed to prostrate themselves before them and never look into their face? Is a noble sharing a drink with a commoners a major faux pas that will get the noble censured? Or are they just fancy titles and Duke Biganmighty is some rich guy who goes out with Bob, Frank, and Dave for a drink after their Saturday golf game? The latter is what we tend to default to in our RP because it's what we know. Without details on how this unequal feudalist society works and some reinforcement of that, nobles just become rich people in America.

I am just going to leave this here to sum up my feelings on this year.

I too must register my confusion about the MUs name. As someone from Louisville, Ky, I thought it was a MU set in a small homeowner's association in our metro area: https://www.joehaydenrealtor.com/louisville-homes/derbyshire-estates/
https://garrettsrealty.com/fisherville/derbyshire-estates.php

@bored said in Derbyshire Estate:

This has to be up there for the tamest drama in the history of WORA/MSB.

It's British style drama.

@GreenFlashlight

God thinks you've been a very naughty person and need some punishing.

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

Incidentally, to everyone else - any advice on locating one of these mythical "other more suitable MUs"? In a separate thread probably.

On a more serious and helpful note, you're not doing yourself any favors by posting this:

@A-B said in Spirit Lake - Discussion:

Hey, it was not my idea to contact you through this site. I was advised to do that by somebody else, who I didn't mention as I didn't know if they'd like that. I mean I'm sorry if it gave you a fright, but it was not my idea. (I'd never even heard of this site before. I was going to send a PM via the AresMUSH forum, but I couldn't register owing to a technical glitch.)

As for my wittering in the game, seriously I was barely in my right mind at the time, you can't go by that. (I am NOT going to go into what was going on, not here, just want to say that I don't mean I was high, as it sounds rather like that!)

I do think (and I want to say this in front of everybody) that before banning somebody without warning, it would be only decent to actually tell them that you want them to stop rabbiting on and see if that does it. (Especially somebody who has already told you that they have Asperger's syndrome, and therefore a tin ear for guessing what somebody is not saying just from the tone of their wording.)

Yes, I am angry.

Accept the ban. Publicly arguing whether or not a ban was justified does not make you look good, unless you have some very compelling evidence of egregious behavior on the part of staff. It certainly does not present you as someone others would want to introduce to the place where they play.

Cats just really love the idea of boxes.

@A-B

Bingo.

We play these games to avoid real life drama. Pretend drama is definitely welcome. Though, sometimes people don't even want that. Right now, you come across as bringing a lot of real life drama to any game you would join, which is the thing people are trying to avoid. Laboriously trying to mechanically mimic a thoroughly normal and average person is what you should do here and when not in character.

@aria

"If so, you can act entitled for money."

Never has a more succinct summary of Americans and our legal system been made.

@arkandel

Absolutely. I pushed for this without much luck on a few L&L games. It's hard to RP trade deals and such when there is no actual mechanical basis for it. It's sort of the opposite of the problem with some Euro board games that have weak flavor and all you're doing is just pushing around cubes with one another. I want the crunch and the fluff!

@Ghost It would probably attract the most annoying of edge lords, though, and they're such a pain to RP with.

Ars Magica method: Mages are the main characters and are overpowered compared to everyone else. Martial characters are trusted sidekicks. Don't worry about balance.

Classless method: Why can't martial characters also dabble in magic and vice versa?

Magic Item method: Magic can only be cast through magic items with each magical item carrying only one spell that it can cast, so they're more like special abilities that anyone can get. See Errant RPG's use of grimoires.

Magic Is Draining method: Magic spells cost magic points to cast (say 1 to 5 out of 10 to 20 total points a character could have). Magic points recover very slowly (say 1 point per day). When you cast a spell, you better mean it.

Magic Is Hard method: It takes a long time to learn how to cast any given spell, so the only people who know more than X are old. X being 2 or 5 or whatever works.

Magic Is Dangerous method: Mages risk flubbing their spell and Bad Things Happen (TM) when they roll poorly. See Warhammer Fantasy RPG, a lot of OSR retroclones (Dungeon Crawl Classics comes to mind), and a slew of other pen & paper RPGs.

Magic Is Evil method: Magic corrupts you when you use it. Only evil people cast it or casting too much risks you becoming an evil NPC or something like that. See Symbaroum.

Magic Is Weak method: Magic does very minor cantrip-like things only.

Magic Is Chaos method: When you cast a spell, you're not quite sure what's going to happen. More dangerous than Magic Is Dangerous, in that with MID, when you do things right, the results are always the same. With this method, there are no standard results, so who the fuck knows whether that flame spell you're casting will light a candle, light a fireplace, light a fireball, or light the whole city?

Magic Is Inhuman method: Is yous an elf or dragon in a human-only PCs game? No? No magics for you!

Magic Is Slow method: All magic is ritual magic - brewing potions, crafting magic items, performing long rituals, etc. No casting a fireball in the heat of battle. If you want to kill someone, it will be quicker and easier just to stab them than it is to spend the three days casting "Slay That Dude" after collecting all the requisite ingredients, not to mention having to learn That Dude's true name.

@Otrere

Huh. There's an idea. Though, I would think it would get boring quick. Have you tried watching a bunch of M*A*S*H at once? After the third hour, you're hoping Hawkeye fucks up the heads coming off the still and accidentally drinks methanol.

It's a similar approach to games that say 'No rape stories.' Most games agree that rape is a thing and probably exists in the setting, but they're simply not exploring it. In the battle of the bulge example, it's much the same. Anti-Semitism was definitely an issue at this time, but we're not exploring it here, so don't venture into that topic.

Removing it from a wider setting of WWII is a bit trickier, but the Third Reich's litany of crimes aren't limited to just the Holocaust. Still with the issue of Holocaust denial as well as America's tendency to have amnesia about the Japanese internment, I think it would be appropriate for some sort of statement on the game's policy files stating that they accept that the Holocaust happened and do not wish to whitewash that particular bit of history. They just don't want those themes explored.

So apparently creative-writing, single-player RPGs are a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COJcWFf0H3U

I figured this might be something up the alley of a lot of folks here.

Assassin's Creed is an interesting setting that has created a large franchise with lots of material; however, what will the players be doing? A great setting does not lead to great gameplay. Will they just be going around killing NPCs or each other? Other than being assassins or Templars, what other options are there? With so few niches, a small number of players could come to dominate the storyline.

@haven My character's super power is crippling depression and the ability to force anyone to hear about his problems.

@Arkandel said in Eliminating social stats:

Look at it this way - if a roleplayer is good enough they can make their character appealing no matter what. It's not cheating, I'm not talking about playing the traits up... but simply portraying an unintentionally funny, fascinating character who might not be wealthy, witty, intelligent or attractive but the writing skill of the person behind the keyboard makes them awesome.

There's no RL equivalency for that. A poor, dull, dumb and ugly person IRL isn't that appealing in the real world.

There is an issue with that, however. If we are rewarding a PC with letting them have what they want because we find them OOCly interesting that hits the main issue that people who support social stats hate. A character that shouldn't sensibly get what they want is getting what they want not because of the character's skill but because the player portraying that character is so good at making them interesting. Hitler didn't sway Germany because they went "Well, he is entirely uncharismatic, but the guy playing him does such a great job at portraying it that I am going to help round up the Jews anyways." If the character is dumb, ugly, poor, and awkward then they should be treated as such whether or not the player is a wordsmith who can mesmerize their fellow players.

I play RPIs, MUXes, and MUSHes and manage to navigate the cultural differences just fine. As for fixing the issue of only being able to play when the server says it is daytime, that can be solved by using alternative time ratios. 1:0.5 would work. You log on and it is 3 am on the server. You log on the next day at the same time and it is 3 pm the same day on the server. This also helps address the issue of stopping by a bar for one or two drinks and conversation at 6 pm Tuesday and you leave at 6 am Wednesday as time will be flowing slow enough that a 4 hours IRL scene was only 2 hours in-game.

If your server needs the weeks to fly by, use time skips. At convenient time IRL when few people are playing, say 5 am, have the server jump ahead four to six days.

I had an idea for a MU centered on a nomadic, tribal society that was moving through and exploring the land as it tried to survived. I would think that such seasonal movements would allow for a more episodic metaplot.