Posts made by Pyrephox

Arx is the tent pole game I can think of right now - it's an original theme medievalish fantasy. NOLA, Obsidian Reverie, and Fallcoast exist for WoD/CoD, as far as I know. There are a handful of small town games, a couple supernatural with original themes (Gray Harbor and Spirit Lake, if the latter is still active), and a couple that aren't. There's at least one historical fantasy - The Savage Skies, which is 30s pulp adventure with a tiny bit of added magic, sort of like Indiana Jones with more airships. There's Euphoria for an original SF theme, even.

@Coin For some people! For me, honestly, I found it almost impossible to fire up a separate client and do things the old way when I tried to go back to a 'regular' MU*. It was just constant, low-level frustration that made the experience a lot less pleasant.

And, I mean, I'm someone who started MU*ing with a raw telnet connection (and did that for about a year or so until someone introduced me to clients), so it's not that I haven't 'roughed it', before. I just don't want to NOW.

@faraday Once you've had a taste of how user-friendly something CAN be, it's very hard to go back to doing it the other way.

If you decide not to go F3S, then it sounds like Fate is already coded, and IMO does freeform/flexible supernatural things very well.

Yessss. I would play this forever.

@silverfox said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

Anyone who doesn't pounce @L-B-Heuschkel when there's a chance to scene with them are crazy as futz.

This is absolute truth. I've only played with him on one game, but it was great fun.

@Lotherio Thank you, that's very kind of you to say!

I don't think people are trying to avoid specific people or anything, usually. It's just a little more intimidating, for me, to sit in an empty, open scene than it is to do so on a grid. It's not logical, but I can see it being inhibiting to people for opening those scenes and hoping someone wanders in.

@krmbm said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

@silverfox said in Web portals and scenes and grids oh my!:

I've yet to play on an Ares game where when I threw up a general scene set and waited, people didn't show up. Yes, I did make sure there were people "active" on the game within it.

This has totally happened to me. Like three times.

Out of the hundreds of scenes I've played on Ares games.

It's happened to me more than three times, I must admit. I love Ares, and the system, but starting an open scene by yourself CAN be hard, and it does feel...rather horribly crushing when you sit there for an hour or two with your set and nobody bites.

I don't think that's a fault in Ares - I've certainly sat on the grid for hours even with pinging on whatever 'want RP' mechanics a game has, and not gotten a bite. But I do think there's a...implicitly public presentation of it that makes it FEEL worse. At least to me. If I sit on the grid, it doesn't really feel like anyone notices except me.

If I sit in an open public scene by myself, it feels like the whole game can see it (and point, and laugh). That is entirely a personal perception issue, but it's probably not one I have /alone/. Or maybe it is. >_>

@Coin Weirdly, the Ares portal doesn't bother me at all. I usually have a bit logged in on the webclient for chat, and then another tab open for the scene in the portal, and that really works for me.

But! Related back to the original premise:

I think games on Ares (and other platforms with this kind of variable scene structure) who want to try and make it easier should set some expectations on 'How To Get RP' and 'How To Advertise for People To Join Your Scene'. Because although I love Ares and it works for me (tm), I do sometimes want to set up scenes that aren't exactly private, but not exactly open, but feel like 'Limited' doesn't quite scratch my itch, either. Although I should absolutely used the Limited tag more often.

@Three-Eyed-Crow I have forgotten every flashback I've ever been invited to. I pose while I'm on, but as soon as I log off, I forget it exists. I'm so sorry to everyone I've let down on those, but...yeah.

Although I don't play, schools just started up in the last couple of weeks, and because 2020, that is sort of a nightmare in a lot of places - so at least part of it might just be because people have kids (or are involved in education) and are losing their minds.

Mostly, I go to the bookstore and wander the shelves, looking at covers, cover copy, and occasionally opening up to the first few pages. I have never found Goodreads useful at all, and while I do listen to recommendations from people who I know have similar interests or enjoy similar things, the vast majority of books I've discovered are just...picking one up, reading a bit, and going, heeeey.

@Paradox My preference is somewhere between your Light Stats and Crunchy categories. I want to be able to make meaningful choices to progress my character and distinguish them, mechanically, from other characters - which includes having to 'give up' certain things to gain others, but also includes (ideally) flavorful, interesting abilities and powers.

The difficulty, of course, is that such systems need to be balanced so that there's no One True Path that lets you do all things better than anyone else, and no Trap Paths which allow you to accidentally create a character which is equally useless at all possible endeavors.

Which is why it is super hard to come up with original mechanical systems for MU*s, I think. You have all your balance issues in regular design, AND the engine needs to be tuned for long-term, persistent play where you will be interacting with characters of very different power levels.

My assumption is that unless someone says, "I'm going to be slow, is that cool?" that posing will happen in real time, with poses taking place every 5-20 minutes. If someone doesn't tell me that they'll be slow, but just goes silent for an hour or two at a time, I will be quietly irritated, because if I don't know that's going to happen, then I'm sitting at the computer, watching for a pose, and thus not really concentrating on anything else. If I know things are going to be slow, then I can tab away and do other stuff.

It's not as much about the pace itself (although it's hard to sustain any sort of real emotion with one pose a day), as it is that I only have so many hours in the day, like most MU*ers at this point, and it's courteous to tell me whether I need to be attending to the scene with my full attention, or if I can faff off for a while.

@reversed Yeah, exactly. I mean, people are people whether they're screaming for a manager down at the local big box store, or throwing a tantrum on Public over a house rule. While the content of disagreements and crises may differ, the way people react to stress tends to stay roughly the same.

Setting boundaries is hugely important, I think. My deleted third topic was actually going to be on social and interpersonal norms, and the way people develop norms. If you don't establish norms for a group explicitly, then people will default back to the norms they internalized from similar situations in their history AND people who don't have relevant histories will learn from the examples they see around them. Experience also tends to be more highly valued than statements when establishing internal schema, so even if your players are hearing 'this community treats other players with respect' if they're SEEING staff mock players, or players mock players, without repercussions, then their adaptation will prioritize that over the statement.

It's almost always better to be explicit about the boundaries of an interaction in the long run.

This is actually inspired by the Water Finds a Crack thread, and I was going to put it there before deciding that I wanted to broaden the conversation without taking away from that specific line of thought. My background is in psychology and professional counseling, and I've long noticed just how applicable some of the things I've learned in practice and education ARE to the design of MU*s. I'm mostly too much of a flake to apply them myself, but I thought that it might be worthwhile for people to discuss some aspects of game design that are more about the people who play games than about the game itself.

(Warning: This is SUPER LONG)

When people create games, a lot of time the big questions are, "What's the setting going to be?", "What's the system going to be?", and "Oh god, who will code/how much can I get done without a coder?" As design of the game goes on, people may or may not ask, "What is the actual theme of our game?" and "What kind of characters are we going to actually support?". But I think we can ask other questions as well, that might have more profound influence on our design, regardless of system and setting:

• What kind of community do I want this game to be?
• What are people looking for in a play experience?
• What kind of play do I want to see players have in this game?

There are more, obviously, but these are just meant to illustrate thinking of the game design based on the effects that design will have on the behavior of your players, and which kinds of players a given design will attract beyond content-based decisions of "I like giant robots" or "I want to play a princess". As an opener, consider the role of two things in game design: community roles, and operant conditioning. There were three here, originally, but this got too fucking long.

Community Roles

Every person adapts to fit a 'role' in a given community. And every community has only a certain number of roles to fill, as well - in a theatre troupe, for example, you only need so many directors, so many actors, so many light techs or set designers. When you have more roles than you have people to fill them, communities tend to be open - even aggressive - about recruiting new people to the fold. Likewise, people are encouraged to try things they might not have experience with, and take on multiple roles (the fledgling troupe might not have a regular director, so everyone who's interested takes on directing something in addition to their other duties). However, as roles become filled with permanent or semi-permanent members, the community becomes more insular, and more, competition is introduced. Roles start becoming curated - who can be the BEST director in the eyes of the community? Additionally, new people tend to find that they are expected to 'prove' themselves, to show that they have value sufficient to balance the competition that they bring. Potential members who don't meet the 'standards' are quietly shuffled off, either actively ("Sorry, you didn't pass the audition,") or passively, through being ignored. Of course, in doing this, the community loses the benefits that new people bring - change, new ideas, and a 'stir of the pot' that keeps a community fresh and vital.

In games, you can see this most clearly in the cycle of opening -> growing -> peak -> overpopulation -> stagnation -> decay. Most games, functionally, only have so many roles to fill, even if their claim is "You can play anything you want", and new games - especially in popular systems/settings - attract a great many people who weren't able to fill a desired role to satisfaction in previous games, all at once. More, some of those limited roles are very popular and 'fill up' to become competitive while others remain unfilled. As an additional complication, many roles in MU*s may be filled by placeholders - players who have that role, and defend that role, but do not use that role to advance the community or the game. Which, much like a director who refuses to cede the position, but also refuses to call any rehearsals, creates stagnation in the community, as everyone whose role depends on that role is forced to wait. Another complication is alternate characters; this enables one player to fill multiple roles within the game. This is neither good, nor bad, in and of itself, but it can mean that the roles available in the game fill up and become competitive faster, which means the community itself becomes insular more quickly.

Implications for game design: Mostly, be cognizant of what roles your game has available (meaningful roles - what are the character roles who are central to the story, who have the ability to drive things, who have significant agency beyond just existing or being 'support') and how you can design the game to keep that role/person ratio beneficial. It may involve opening up new areas of the game world in stages (provided you have the staff to do that), or restricting alts either from holding certain multiple roles, or just in general. Activity within roles is also something to think of - how will your game handle someone 'squatting' on a very influential or competitive role? What effect will if have on your game if X position is filled by someone who doesn't play out the role? How can you build in workarounds for roles who depend on another role, but that role remains unfilled or is filled by someone who isn't interested in the interdependence?

Operant Conditioning

The very basic definition: People tend to repeat behaviors they are rewarded for. If you want your players to do certain things, build rewards for doing those things. If you DON'T want your players to do certain things, for heaven's sake, don't reward them for doing them. The concept of punishment is a bit more complex (punishment, in general, suppresses but does not extinguish a behavior - if you punish someone for doing something, the general take away is not "I won't do that anymore," but rather, "I'll be more careful to not get caught next time,"

Where this gets complex in a game environment is that certain consequences can function as unintentional rewards. For example, if someone finds an exploit in the system, and the exploit is closed, but the person gets to keep the result of their exploit, this rewards finding an using exploits in the system - as long as you are the first person (or first people) to find and use the exploits before they are closed. Likewise, the rewards that people are motivated by will differ, but two that you are MOST LIKELY to run into are: mechanical improvement, and character agency. Players, by and large, are strongly attracted to rewards that allow them to a) improve some aspect of their character's mechanical values or assets, or b) serve as a concrete marker of in-game agency, influence, status, or power. And keep in mind that as these are rewards, they serve as ends in themselves, not (just) means to other ends - in other words, people will chase those two things even if they have no concrete plans on how to use them after they get them.

Additionally, many players may have some level of compulsive or addictive personalities. This is where it ties in directly to the Water Finds a Crack thread, as well: some portion of players will ruin a game for themselves because they cannot STOP themselves from optimizing or pursuing rewards, even if those rewards are not fun. More, if you introduce a 'grind', some players will pursue that grind to the exclusion of all other activities, even if it's actively unfun. Increasing the level of the grind to make it 'less rewarding' or 'less useful' will only increase the compulsive behavior because you've just created what's called a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, and that goes directly to our monkey brains and says "do this forever".

Implications for game design: Think about what you're rewarding your players for doing, because they are largely going to follow whatever the rewards are - even if you didn't intend something to BE a reward. XP is the most basic reward for most games, and most people have already seen how certain schedules of XP dispersal can actively create different behaviors (good and bad). Since XP will PROBABLY be your main reinforcer in most games, consider using it to facilitate the behavior you want to see...or at least stop using it to reward behavior that's actively hurting a game. Anything that allows a 'grind' should be capped at some low upper number in a given time period, unless you want a certain portion of your playerbase to focus on that grind to the exclusion of many other activities. IC titles/powers/abilities are often viewed as rewards, not necessarily as tools - you will have people compete viciously for them who have no intent of using them; the GAINING of the reward is the point.

There. Word vomit done. But I'm interested in how other designers have thought about or used psychology/sociology to build their MU*s? Even if not formally, just thinking about how your observations of how people act on games and in groups, and using that to help design your game?

@Wizz said in What Types of Games Would People Like To See?:

Street level secret world weirdness. Like, say, The Secret World but grimier; there's no globe-spanning organizations and nobody has more than scraps of anything. It's all cults and nomadic secret orders and they all want a slice of some big mystical pie nobody in their right mind should ever actually touch, because magic and old gods and the mysteries behind the universe are something that will someday, somehow, guaranteed get you buried in an unmarked grave or get you so disappeared you may as well be. But you were touched by it, and that one taste will never ever be enough.

I, too, would kill for an Unknown Armies game.

Unfortunately, tabletop systems really are not meant for a long-term, persistent environment with a lot of PCs who may come into conflict with each other. WoD/CoD particularly aren't meant for it, considering just how terrible both White Wolf and Onyx Path are with balancing powers vs. costs even WITHIN splats, much less between splats.

The tabletop philosophy of 'keep getting XP indefinitely or until campaign ends' doesn't, IMO, work for MU*s for a number of reasons.

I'm not hugely susceptible to the need to exploit, but this definitely matches my observations over time. Especially if players can 'grind' for XP or other resources, they have a tendency to do it obsessively, no matter how UNFUN the actions required are.

At least part of it seems to be a need to 'keep up with the Joneses', and one of the things I think Ares does (in addition to the things @Clarion has mentioned) is institute caps on the 'main' skills and character attributes. You can still expand Background Skills, to continue that sense of progression, but I'm really starting to become a fan of slow XP progression, and upper level caps on any resource that can be gained, both in a single time period, and overall.

So, like, if you have a mechanism where someone can Do Something to earn XP, or Arx-like resources, or Luck Points, you can only gain so many in a single time period, and once you hit that limit, there is NO NEED to grind any further, and you can be assured that no one else is somehow getting 'more' by doing more. Likewise, you will eventually hit a ceiling where you just can't hold anymore of that resource, or spend anymore of that resource, and so you no longer have to worry about it.

@HelloProject said in Gauging Interest in a new Erotic RP MU* (with anonymous survey):

@Pyrephox said in Gauging Interest in a new Erotic RP MU* (with anonymous survey):

I wouldn't mind an Erotic MU* with a stronger theme, as long as the theme doesn't get in the way of having erotic play, if that makes sense? Although there's nothing wrong with having an Erotic MU* that focuses on a single small set of kinks. Like, I think there are niche MUs like...Shoujo Ai MU? Or that m/m superhero MU* I don't remember the name of. Where they lean into a specific kink constellation.

But, I admit, one of the things that appeals to me about a huge 'wide theme' MU* is the ability to get a whim, create a character for a specific scenario, and be able to (theoretically) find that scenario until I get bored with it, then drop the character without causing any distress to anyone else, or messing up any sort of plots.

I have nothing against games like that, it's just that when it's pretty much nearly every game of this sort that gets made, I'm like, I'm ready for new shit.

It would be interesting! It would be a lot smaller, though - which comes with its own sets of 'downsides' for a sex-MU, since the drama is going to go through the roof. Especially if there's continuity and theme and infidelity (oh my!). Or, let's face it, perceived infidelity based on the fact that someone once pounced and snuggled someone else on a channel, and now that means THEY OWN THEM and how dare you try and break them up.

One good thing about the uber-MU*s is that you really can just nope out of any interaction you don't enjoy, and still have literally hundreds of other characters to play with.