Best posts made by Seraphim73

@faraday said in Incentives for RP:

I must confess though that I've always found it weird that you need to incentivize RP at all. Like... RP is literally the point of the game.

While I agree with you that the need to do this is kind of baffling, I also think that if you incentivize the type of RP you want, then it's worthwhile. Because yes, everyone is here for RP, because MUSHes are RP games, but not everyone is here to spread plot hooks and welcome new players onto the grid and generally support the actions of others. Many players feel that's burdensome, so if you want it, you incentivize it.

I can only speak for myself, but I do have some of Theory 2 going on when it comes to plot-scenes. I know that I've had spotlight-hogging tendencies in the past, and I want to do everything I can to avoid them now.

That being said, I think that the flood of poses close to one another may also be a result of the fact that it just takes a certain amount of time to type up a pose for a large portion of MUSHers. So if it takes 10-15 minutes to type up a "solid" opening pose, then most of the poses are going to flood in between 10 and 15 minutes.

I'm also totally happy to set most non-plot scenes, particularly if I suggested the idea.

@surreality A Moment in Tyme was an RP-enforced MUD that (for a significant period of its existence) had no combat code. All fights were determined by your "Weaponmastery Score," which was based on logs of posed-out fights which were graded by Staffers (or players with high-Weaponmastery characters under the direction of Staffers). The "better" your posing, the higher your Weaponmastery score went. Needless to say, this was very subjective.

I too have vague memories of some players of high-Weaponmastery characters getting very upset if you didn't use 'pronated' or 'supinated' to describe how you were holding your hands/forearms/weapon.

@JinShei said in Serious Question About Making A MU:

I'll note that, as a noncoder, I've been able to set up discworld mush entirely in ares with support from @faraday and the discord.

Likewise. I mean, not with Discworld, but likewise. It's great a) to be able to have an out-of-the-box codebase that even an entirely novice coder can set up, and b) the help and support that Fara and the Discord (band name!) provide.

@bear_necessities said in Staff’s Job?:

@Seraphim73 said in Staff’s Job?:

Ensure that the world reacts to the actions of the PCs. This touches on points 1 (hopefully) and 2 (definitely) as well, but if the world only acts on PCs, never reacts to them, a lot of players (myself included) are going to get bored.

You know, I always wondered how staff can best do this. What are some ways a staff can make you feel like the world reacting to your actions? Are emits enough? What sort of things do people expect?

I mean, obviously the true answer is that it depends on the person. For me, I think the most important thing is that it's ways in which the player can see them, and can point at them to other players and go, "See that? That was me." So maybe it's a mention in a bboard post of someone's efforts in creating a particular defensive position when the enemy is thrown back, or specifically calling out someone's contribution in the wrap-up pose of an event, or the King repeating a joke the PC told to them at the start of a big court scene, or an NPC superior mentioning a PC's idea to another PC for their input, or as simple as explicitly showing NPCs reacting to a player's actions during a round of combat.

I think any time Staff is summing up events or setting a scene, if they can mention the actions of PCs (by name or just in some way that makes it clear who made that impact), it's a great opportunity to show the world reacting to PCs. If there are NPCs interacting with the PCs in a scene, explicitly calling out how they're reacting and why is great ("the Tusken Raiders turn and run" is nice, but "the Tusken Raiders turn and run because of the Wookiee's terrifying howl," is awesome).

I think it's even better when the impact lasts beyond 1-2 scenes. Does a PC's great line become some new bit of slang that spreads throughout the whole game? Does "but you're no <PC's name>" start being used to rein in people who are getting cocky about their skill at <PC's specialty>? Does the decision to build defenses in one particular area in one particular way lead to an entire plotline as people have to defend them -- or take them back after an NPC stupidly retreats from them?

I know some (smaller) places do weekly story updates, and I think this is a great way to call out precisely how PCs (and players) have impacted the story.

I don't think that there's anything that should be expected, except for some acknowledgement by the game world that the actions of the characters are having an impact on it. But I also think that the more you can demonstrate the impact of PCs, the more engaged those players will be.

@TNP I mean, Hypaphian (https://savageskies.aresmush.com/wiki/beings:draconians) is a gold dragon, but... I think he's more likely to have a you of his own than vice versa.

@surreality Thanks! We are so far. I'm excited to see what players add to the setting, and all the stories they tell (and we tell with them).

@Autumn Fun fact, this game started because I wanted to play with Ares and put together a Crimson Skies simulator so that I could throw aircraft at zeppelins. It got (even) better.

@KDraygo said in Vietnam War MUSH:

There was nothing good about the Vietnam War to play about.

Unless it's Aliens.

I think that the list @bear_necessities put together is a good one. I agree that the most important things are policy, theme files, and some descriptions (I like the idea of at least a dozen RP centers).

Other things I would suggest having ready are:

• A Chargen Guide to walk players through creating characters.
• A few scenes/events ready to go to set the status quo in the game (give players a couple of weeks of status quo to get onto the game, through chargen, and settled).
• A plan for the first way to break the status quo (monster of the month, metaplot, whatever it is).

You'll need enough Staff to handle apps, answer questions, and provide the status quo and the break in the status quo, but what number that needs to be depends on the Staff involved.

@pyrephox said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

Even a 'bar RP' scene can be meaningful, if you consider the setting, the NPCs, and your characters' purposes for being in that place at that time.

I already +1ed this, but I want to do it with words too. Inhabiting the setting rather than just playing characters divorced from it is what makes your WoD game different from your Supers game and your L&L game and your BSG game. Rifle through those crop-cornered sheets of paper, or spill ink across the table from the inkwell, or struggle with a toner cartridge until you use your super strength (from being a Garou or a Vamp or from being a superhero) to just rip the MFer out.

If you're not engaging with the setting, I feel like you're missing out so much on the game. Heck, even your "X City After Dark" games can be set apart by where you are. If it's June in Seattle, you're likely ordering a hot coffee, if it's June in Atlanta you might be looking for an iced coffee. Little things that make your character and your RP part of the world, not separate from it, are SO critical in keeping things interesting. And yeah, as @Pyrephox said... those room descs and personal descs are critical for making this work.

1. React to your characters. If you're just slamming them with scene-sets and monologues from NPCs, the players aren't going to be interested in the slightest, no matter how good your writing is. On the other hand, if you're reacting to the words and actions of the characters and the players can see the impact they're having on the story, they'll be a great deal more invested and interested.

2. Let the characters impact the story. This is really part of the first point, but it's important, so I'll add it here. Consider point one to be the 'micro' where your NPCs are reacting to the turn-by-turn actions of the PCs, and point two as the 'macro,' where you don't have a predetermined ending, but you're leaving it open to be set by the actions of the characters.

3. Make your NPCs memorable but not annoying. You want the PCs to care what happens to the NPCs (whether they want to make them happy or kill them, so long as they care). The best way to do that (in my opinion) is to treat them as non-consent PCs. You should care as much about their motivations as their plans (why they're doing things compared to what they're doing). This will also help you improvise when your players knock you for a loop (they will).

4. Engage the senses. This is just plain good writing, but the more atmospheric you can make your scene-sets, the better. If the PCs are exploring a nuclear reactor in a colony they've lost contact with ("Is this going to be a stand up fight, sir, or another bug hunt?"), think about the swirling steam that restricts visibility, yes, but also think about how that much steam is liable to make it incredibly muggy, and to hiss around the PCs, and it might even give the air a metallic or ozone tang.

5. Change things as needed. Scenes that are too hard or too easy just aren't that fun (for most people, there are some who love wading through enemies like they've just typed IDKFA). So if the PCs obliterated the first wave, throw a second wave at them (this works for social or physical combat, of course, or even for mysteries... clues that lead to clues!); if the PCs are getting hammered, maybe some of the enemy get distracted by something else going on nearby.

6. Make it matter. Are you running a combat scene? Make it part of a larger battle to give the skirmish more scope (being part of a battle involving thousands can feel a lot more sweeping and important than a brawl with five people on each side, even if combat-wise, it's just five-on-five either way). Mention NPCs facing off against one another at a tournament. Describe the Harpy in the corner talking about what the PCs just did (you don't even have to let them know exactly what the Harpy said... are they getting mocked or complimented in those whispers?). Not every scene has to be (or should be) earth-shattering, but let the players watch the consequences to their characters' actions build.

7. Have the crowd react. If there are NPCs around the action, have them react to the actions of the PCs. There's no better way to have the PCs feel like they're a part of the world than to have the world react to their actions. Especially if there's someone that the PCs want to impress (their superior, a pretty person of the proper persuasion, their parents, or whomever) present.

@faraday Actually, I think that players viewing MU*s as novels with their characters as the protagonists is part of the problem, if indeed there is a problem. Yes, the personal story of each character is important, but I would argue that the metastory of the game itself is more important. It's the collaborative work between all of the players (including Staff) that should be the heart of the game, not individual story threads, and when those individual threads are put ahead of the metastory, I think that the game suffers.

If by "the expanded Marvel Universe" you mean the movie universe, then I would generally agree with you that it's been handled well (although Age of Ultron definitely had its issues as a "collaborative" story), but if you mean the comic universe... I would actually say it's a tangled, no-good mess of retcons and retcons-that-should-be.

Now, I don't think that game-wide metastory should run roughshod over the stories of individual characters at the whim of a capricious and violent Staff, but I do think that the relatively recent mania for consent-based gameplay and the accompanying (relative) lack of consequences has hurt MU*ing in general.

But we're way off-topic now. Anyhow, as I said, I think that an Altered Carbon-style resleeving technology could keep the game "dangerous" and allow the metastory to proceed unabated, while still offering some protection for individual story threads.

@Arkandel said in Core Memories Instead of BG?:

I agree. One of the mistakes people make is generate characters who've already done all the cool things in their lives before they ever step foot on the grid

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. If I see another BG filled to the brim with awesome events of awesomeness that the player just wants to brag about... I'm going to scream (I'm going to be screaming a lot). Get your accomplishments ON SCREEN, so that others know about them, you get to actually experience them, and others are involved in them, so -they- have reasons to bring them up.

On a more pertinent note, I love the idea of using Core Memories, and wish I had thought of it in time to use it on The 100 MUSH. But yes, I use BGs for the same purposes that @Sunny does: demonstrate an understanding of theme, match the story to the stats... and for one more: To prevent the AwesomeBGers from slipping onto the grid.

On topic: I'm getting RP as often as I can manage (which isn't very often with my current schedule) on Fires of Hope, and occasionally on Battlestar Galactica: Unification.

Off topic: I don't necessarily want character death in a game, but I want the honest and very real risk of character death in a game. Without risk, there's no real reward, in my opinion. Even if characters don't die, as long as we're scrabbling and scrambling to keep them from dying then I'm good. On most games these days, however, people are more concerned about the story of their own characters, rather than their character's part in the larger game story. So they get upset when anything happens to their character that they didn't plan to happen.

And when those folks became the majority, that's when MUSHing got less fun for me, because the excitement and risk of the unknown is what kept me so engaged through high school and college.

It's more about method of advancement than what advancement means, but one thing I'm digging on Fires of Heaven is the +goals system. Each character can have up to 3 goals at once, and each goal has a certain number of logs required to complete it. Each week, you can submit one log toward one of your goals, and each log is worth 75 * Your Level XP--up to the required number of logs, at which point additional logs put toward it before "completion" are worth 100 * Your Level XP. Once you've hit the required number of logs (and completed your goal), you can turn in the goal for your XP.

It ties major advancement of your +sheet to major advancement of your character, provides advancement via event and social RP alike, and means that if your character starts to feel like they've plateaued, all you have to do is check their +goals to remember what they're supposed to be striving toward. Now, I would personally make it so that each +goal could get a log each week, rather than limiting it to one log total per week, but I like the system. A lot.

@WTFE Your description of Staff failure to follow up on a player-run plot is, in my experience, a large part of why people stopped running PrPs. However, even when Staffers have shown their willingness to follow up, there's little impetus from players to run them... again, in my experience.

I was actually trying to get to the point of--even when Staff is running active things and dragging plot-hooks galore out in front of the players, very few players can be bothered to follow-up.

All of this points towards a larger problem, however, which @WTFE brought up too. Players have been burned so many times by bad staffers, and staffers have been burned so many times by bad players, that no one trusts each other anymore. Staffers (often) put a layer of bureaucracy between players and the ability to do anything because they don't trust players to be anything but batshit crazy. Players won't put themselves out there because they're afraid of having their stories messed with.

Here's where I disagree with @WTFE on it however--I think that the sense of entitlement is very real. I've seen it staffing games and I've seen it playing games, players who basically hang around until there's a Staff-run plot, then rush toward it, and afterwards bitch about how it wasn't all about them as they go back to idling in the OOC room. A large portion of today's playerbase isn't around to tell stories, they're there to be entertained. By other people (as @saosmash mentioned).

Yes, there are still a good salting of proactive, motivated, engaged, and engaging players looking to tell cooperative stories with others--they're gold. They are what help staff turn a game from a string of encounters into a living story.

@HelloProject said in A Constructive Thread About People We Might Not Like:

One of my big peeves about games is how staff need players to explicitly break some super well-defined rule in order for something to count as harassment or a big problem. Putting people's emotional well-being behind bureaocratic red tape is something I see as a problem

I'm totally behind the "kick out problem players the moment they become a problem, even if they haven't broken any specific rule" movement. And I fully support the right of game staff to decide what a problem player is.

Does this mean I might be kicked off a game for "nothing?" Yup.

Does this mean that those staffers might lose additional players due to "arbitrary" bans? Yup.

Does this mean that there will be bitchfests on MSB and elsewhere about how evil and wrong those staffers are? Yup.

Do I still think it's better for the hobby/game to do this? Yup.

@lotherio As @Kalakh noted, and I agree with, a silent majority in a message board community isn't. It's the lurkers (nothing wrong with lurking, I lurk more than I post here, particularly now). Those who participate in the community are the community when the community is about participating. (Is that a tautology? I think that's a tautology, but I think it got the point across). I'm not saying that there can't be a community here that grows and even flourishes with a number of vocal participants having departed, I'm just saying that when the majority of the vocal participants leave a community, it's not the same community anymore.

I don't think that it's helpful to compare those who left to Germans in the '30s and '40s, nor to compare those who left to those pushing The Big Lie about the 2020 US Presidential election. I think that contributes to pushing people into their own echo chambers and reinforces distrust and disgust already built up by the use of strawman arguments.

Also, I believe that it's absolutely possible to want more active moderation without wanting someone who is not trusted by a significant and vocal portion of the community to moderate them. I also believe that it's absolutely possible to want more active moderation without wanting discussion to be shut down and directed to DMs -- particularly since one of the best parts about this board (to me) is the ability to express dissatisfaction and complaints about MU*s in the open.

@Derp said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I assume this is the general 'you'? Because I didn't actually ban a single person. I voted, with a group, on who should stay and who should come back and who should remain banned, and lest someone think we are a hivemind, the ban votes were not unanimous.

First "you" was definitely general, as in "the admin of this board at the time." The second "you" is... also general, I suppose. The folks who are being called bullies by folks on this board are gone, either because they've been banned or have chosen to leave.

As for needing popular friends to speak up, I'm certainly not anyone's idea of a popular figurehead among any group here, but right there in my example, folks defended me. We've seen people who dislike folks who have been accused still come out of the woodwork to defend them from false accusations. This community, before it was splintered, was pretty good about that. There will always be flying monkeys, but there will also always be those willing to defend the innocent.

And @Ghost, I'm with @reimesu -- just don't defend Spider. But yes, I would do my due diligence to see if the person was Spider... and also if they had done the thing my friend said they had done. And I would be one of the folks who spoke up to try to clear the person's name if the accusations weren't true, because people did that for me.

@faraday I agree, I think that just as with tech, there is a tipping point into "too much detail." I think that that tipping point is further out with culture/entertainment than it is with tech, but that may well just be me. I think that knowing how the tech works doesn't necessarily make for richer characters (but it can make for richer stories), but that knowing how the culture works definitely makes for richer characters.

For example: Clone Trooper 4646 and Clone Trooper 1231 are talking.

4646: "There's a great grav-ball bar down the street, we could totally hang out there since we're off-duty."
1231: "Grav-ball? Man, I can't stand that stuff. Limmie is where it's at."

Sure, that's nice, but if you know something about grav-ball (football-ish) and limmie (soccer)?

4646: "There's a great grav-ball bar down the street, we could totally hang out there since we're off-duty."
1231: "Grav-ball? You want to watch people line up for two hours and play for one? I don't know how you can call yourself a clone trooper and not love limmie, man. It's the beautiful game, it's small unit tactics in a ball-game. Everyone always moving, having to adjust on the fly?"
<insert argument back and forth on the relative merits of the two games and how they relate to being a clone trooper>

Now, I totally agree that you can say that a character is "listening to Caprican music," and that alone can tell you a great deal about the character (especially if they aren't Caprican), but I love being able to dig into the nitty-gritty of why a character likes a given thing, and what that says about them. Then again... I'm a nerd.