Posts made by Pyrephox

Another factor is that, let's be honest? Expecting school personnel to deliver instruction, or kids to receive instruction, at a comparable level when people are literally dying around them is...kind of nuts. Teachers have lost family, friends, colleagues. Kids have lost the same, and even if we're not talking about the deaths as much in the media, that doesn't mean they're stopping. It's almost worse that it's a steady, ongoing trickle of deaths rather than a singular devastating event, because no one can go 'okay, it's over, we can relax'. Adults and children have to wake up every day with the knowledge that today might be the day someone they know, or themselves, gets sick with something that can kill them.

Every one of us is dealing with chronic stress and trauma right now, and the more we try to ignore that and push for 'normal', the worse off people are going to be.

One of the complicating factors is that pretty much none of the schools which went virtual or hybrid did so with any real understanding of the support that virtual learning requires for teachers. Which isn't unusual: even a lot of purpose-made virtual schools aren't aware of best practices in virtual instruction and don't provide their staff with the training and support necessary to really succeed at virtual learning. It's not as simple as chucking a teacher without specific training in front of a Zoom and having 30+ students log on, give the teacher no additional assistants or support, and expect that to go well. It's not.

I think it ended up burning out a lot of teachers and students, and convincing districts and many parents that virtual learning was a non-viable option, and now everyone is exhausted and stressed and at the end of their mental ropes. Everyone, from the kids all the way up.

I will never stop loving when you can have a scene with big, complex or negative emotions and people doing/saying the kind of impulsive things that people say/do, and it doesn't hurt any OOC feelings or cause any OOC drama, and instead you can just enjoy the IC drama with the other players involved.

@Carma Thank you for sharing! I'm not necessarily sure I see the need - especially if that list is as granular and extensive as that snippet implies. I think it could be very, very easy to accidentally trip over someone's horrific aversion to, I dunno, severe weather even when you've tried to make sure they're fine with body horror, or bad language, or whatever would seem higher on the threat spectrum, but I appreciate what you're trying to do.

I suspect what will actually happen, though, is that people just ask OOC "hey, I'm thinking of a scene that incorporates X, Y, and Z. Any of that on your do not fly list" or something. Typically speaking, if you make a technology that makes things /harder/ for people, then they'll work around it.

I'll say that I appreciate you laying out exactly what the non 'optional' things in the game are, and wish more games would do that so that people can self-select in or out with full information.

Also, it looks like you've done a LOT of work on this game, and with a heavily coded game, that's difficult to follow through on. Great work!

I'm curious about the reasoning behind only allowing a consent check on one item once a day - a given scene or plot might logically include a number of things which could be no-go areas for someone, so it seems like it'd facilitate cooperation if people could just access or share their full lists so that they can more easily find people of compatible tastes and boundaries.

I think you are the longest consistent person who I've known in MU*dom, and it was always and ever a pleasure. Every single time, in every game. My condolences on your loss, and I hope that when we finally (FINALLY) get through the pandemic, you can settle into something that is wonderful. Because you deserve that!

@sunny said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel

I mean in a perfect world, the Prince is played by somebody who can only RP once every third month to begin with outside of scheduled 'court' type scenes, anyway -- your vampire sphere is a LOT more healthy without having the head honcho about and engaged. Bad leaders are WAY better for creating RP and conflict than good ones.

Bolded for emphasis. Absolutely. And I DO tend to think, these days, that the Head Honchos should be NPCs. PCs get too invested in things going 'right', or blaming IC leaders for things going 'wrong', and they often have this utopian ideal of how an org/sphere "should" be run that basically results in systemic burnout from leaders, and constant bitching from non-leaders.

Make the head honcho an NPC who does not give a shit about people's kvetching, who has major, interesting flaws that drive story, and who is there primarily to maintain your theme and push plot. Sometimes by being terrible. Sometimes by cutting through bullshit. Sometimes by not wanting to deal with something and so appointing a few random PCs to 'sort it out and tell me when it's finished'.

@sunny said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel

It's a problem better solved by game design, in removing situations in which one person specifically needs to be consulted.

Honestly, this is better design ALL AROUND. Remove bottlenecks wherever possible, especially ones where you have to go through one player or staff member. Some have to be kept, but anything where you can /spread that out/, do so.

Not just because of toxic people, but because of adult human beings. People have work. People have different time zones. People log on to play fun scenes with their friends, not do administrative work for companies/factions/organizations that don't even exist. Being an 'IC Leader' should not really mean having OOC responsibilities to organize and shepherd other people's play time, and it doesn't mean that a 'non-leader' PC should have to get every damn thing they want to do rubberstamped, either.

Bottlenecks kill involvement. Having to wait weeks or months to hear from the One Person who can move you forward or even say 'hey, you can try this' is anti-fun.

I tend to think the ideal MU* structure player-side tends to be a large number of smallish Sandwich Clubs with some overlap. It's sort of what IC factions tend to be trying to create. People can't play with everyone on the game - even if you wanted to, there just aren't enough hours in the day to give equal distribution to everyone. But a group that doesn't play with ANYONE else does tend to become insular and isolated from the game at large. What I really like, is groups where, hey, maybe there's five people who play together a lot - but everyone of those five have at least a couple of people outside of that group who they also play with a lot. And THOSE people have about four other people who they play with a lot, but each of those people have a couple of people outside of that group the play with - so the whole game is connected by a few degrees of separation, even though most people play most of the time with four-to-six people.

I think Sandwich Clubs tend to get toxic when they start trying to police who people play with outside the group. Either by outright 'I won't play with you if you play with X' or the more subtle (not MUCH more subtle, but...) attempts to monopolize playgroup members, or egging them on to criticize people outside the group (so that they can later go back and tell those people oooooh look what X said about you and isolate the club member further).

@ganymede said in The Desired Experience:

@arkandel

If staff does not intend to service a particular concept, then they shouldn’t allow that concept as a PC.

It is an easy fix for this problem.

In KB/AM games, one of the things I really appreciated them doing is having a sheet for 'wanted' character concepts, and then also listing character concepts that they considered 'overdone' for the setting, and then also closing character concepts when they decided the game had enough, or that the concept wasn't appropriate for this particular game. More games should do that, I feel like.

@faraday said in The Desired Experience:

Agency in the sense of "doing stuff that matters in the world" isn't everything, either. Take TGG for instance. In most of the campaigns, the PCs were grunts. They couldn't impact the war. They couldn't choose their missions. The battle code could kill them at any moment. BSGU was in a similar vein, though not as hard-core.

People want different things. There's no one perfect recipe for a game to be successful.

I think rather than "the world", agency should look at "my world". In TGG, PCs couldn't change the course of a war, no, but they could do things that affected their own trajectory or those of others around them (I assume - caveat that I did not play the game). A nurse could save a life. A soldier could pick a target and have a chance of bringing them down.

The whole world/setting doesn't have to be up for grabs for players to feel they have agency - and, honestly, these days I think you NEED to firmly define some setting elements as 'these will not change' or else players tend to get anxious and overinvested in reworking the world to be more fair/just/equitable and then get overwhelmed by the enormity of that task (or frustrated when staff point out that even an amazing success on a single action or skill check can only bring about incremental and limited change, because culture has inertia, or that goal is just Too Big).

Give people some parameters around the kind of agency they can expect, I think, upfront and in clear language. Don't dick around with, "Well, maybe, if you work hard enough..." because that tends to kick Gamer OCD into high gear, and suddenly someone's spending eighty hours a week on the game trying to grind to their fantasy utopia or whatever, and /miserable/ but unable to make themselves stop because that brass ring feels very shiny.

I just thought of another aspect of experience that's very important to me, but it's more of a meta thing -

Having a theme that is either loose enough, or well-explained enough, that I can run stuff when the mood strikes me without requiring a great deal of oversight or bureaucracy. I burn out on games a LOT faster when I don't have the option to generate content of some sort - usually not big, sweeping plots, but being able to run scenes or miniplots with minimal handholding or approval from Staff. A game that gives me the tools/guidelines up front for that will keep me a lot longer (if I find the theme inspiring) than a game that has a whole bunch of hidden theme I'm scared of 'running into' or that requires a big approval process and checking in with staff about any plots.

@arkandel I think another thing that games can do is be more explicit about the experience they want to provide. Like, so often I've seen characters be approved in a game where the character is clearly built for a specific experience - only for the game runners to turn around and be either indifferent or actively hostile to that experience.

In which case, they shouldn't approve the character. It's okay to say no to applications that don't fit what you're looking for. It's okay to state upfront that, hey, the theme of this game is adventure pulp and action, and we're not interested in digging very deep into the metaphysics of the setting or exploring the way X works, so characters built around that will not be approved.

It's impossible to get EVERYONE on the same page: some people are always going to want to play a Pokemon. But we can do a better job of communicating that we often do. Lessen the issue, if not eliminate it.

This is a very good question, because I run into a lot of that same sort of frustration and the tip over between that frustration and the fun I do have is often what leads to me quietly exiting a MU*.

The experience I want varies to some degree by the game and its theme, but generally what I'm looking for is:

• A cinematic experience, with moments of high action, high drama, or high stakes.
• An experience where I feel my character has the potential to meaningfully contribute to the plot of the game - this doesn't mean to SUCCEED all the time, because constant success ends up not feeling earned or meaningful. But mysteries that fundamentally unsolvable (not just HARD to solve) frustrate me, /if/ they're core to the game experience. If they're not, then that's fine - I'm totally okay with "this problem of the game world is thematically fundamental and won't change" as long as there aren't a whole lot of plots about trying to change it and failing.
• An experience that is cooperative OOC and often fraught with conflict IC. I want to experience 'big' events and big conflicts in a game - I'm not particularly interested in games that have no room for characters to clash. But I also get frustrated when people immediately take IC conflict to an OOC place, and try to manipulate or punish people OOC for IC events.
• Finally, I want to enjoy the people I play with on an OOC level. We don't have to be best friends forevers, or anything, but I'm not really interested in an 'IC-only' environment where people don't chat OOC. RPGs are, for me, fundamentally a social endeavor and a game where people don't chat OOC or seem to enjoy each other's company at least a little is...empty, for me.

@faraday said in Paying for a MU*?:

There have been a lot of pay-to-play MUDs, and ones that offer premium benefits like the Iron Realms family.

My friend worked for one of the big paid MUD houses back in the heyday. It was quite a venture - IT staff, paid GMs/admins, and so forth.

It's hard to imagine successfully translating that to a MUSH environment. You'd have to have an absurd GM-to-player ratio to provide enough entertainment to satisfy players, and that would be tough to scale up to a level where you could pay them all.

I suspect you'd rather pivot to a MUD/MUSH sort of hybrid, with more coded systems for players to interact with in 'off times', and then events/scenes for GMs to run. The biggest thing is that you'd have to make sure that GMed scenes covered all the major timezones unless you wanted to focus on players from one timezone (which, honestly, might be your best bet starting out, then expand to different timezone coverage if/when you had the ability to hire people on).

@arkandel I mean...these things exist? They're not hypothetical constructs that we have to imagine how they'd look and act. There are pay-to-play MUDs out there. There have been pay-to-play MUSHes that have made money. They haven't made anyone rich, to my knowledge, but they have been going concerns that have survived for years. Just because they're not popular with/known by the MSB community doesn't mean they don't exist.

@arkandel said in Paying for a MU*?:

@pyrephox What would that game's advantage be over, say, Shang? What problem does it solve (other than $20/month for hosting fees) or what features would be expected that current games don't have, regardless of theme?

I suspect it would be more highly coded. I seem to recall that Flexible Survival was/is paid, and seems to be both still going strong (after yeaaaars) and fairly successful. Doing a quick search, it looks like it's coded enough that there's actually a single-player option, so the code is fairly standalone so that players don't have to rely on having a GM or other players who match their exact schedule.

I suspect a paid-for MU* that WASN'T a sex-MU* would want to try and emulate that to some extent; players would need to be able to get value whenever they log in, so you'd want coded systems that they can interact with, even if those are more narrative - maybe something like coded investigation systems, or exploration systems, things that would provide on-demand hooks/resources that the player could then use in live scenes with others.

I don't see any inherent problem with a for-pay MU*. The biggest thing is that if you were going to make it a business, you would need to run it like a business. And I don't think most people who make games really want to take that on, even for money.

I suspect the right MU* could make decent bank. And by 'right MU*', I honestly mean a sex MU*. And probably furry.

@derp Same reason I bounced off ESO. The decision not to instance most quest points in ESO is one that continues to baffle me. It is not 2000, and I should not have to wait in a line to kill a boss at the end of a dungeon!