Best posts made by SparklesTheClown

WoD games are some of the few places in MUs that actually needs a prefs system and doesn't have one. I hold to what I used to say back on WORA, which is that the WoD part of our hobby is always like 10 years behind much needed innovation, and is highly resistant to common sense things that other games have done for the longest time now, because basically ??? "It doesn't work fuck that/slippery slope/I won't even try it/but the principle of the thing!"

Granted, I said "actually needs", not every game needs such a system, but most of the ones that do, usually have one (typically ones with potentially mature themes). Like, let's have some self-awareness here, WoD games are like a step or two above Shang as far as mature themes go. Not having a preferences system in such games is insane to me. And I've always found such systems to only make having a dialogue about preferences less stigmatizing.

I've been on plenty of games where the sorts of perspectives here on, like, what is essentially basic human social interaction and setting up expectations based on that, would be considered downright alien. Saying "This is unacceptable and I shouldn't have to adhere to the basic social etiquette of every day life in a MU, because <insert worst case scenario here>", is a bit outrageous. Basic social etiquette and communicating expectations is many, many steps removed from "being someone's therapist".

I personally think that if one is unable to communicate at a super basic level without it being distressing or making them feel the burden of a thousand therapists, GMing is probably not for them.

I should state that I absolutely hate downvotes in a social context, because they're easily abused and in my opinion create a sort of emotional and cultural toxicity. Just look at old WORA.

That said, Multiverse Crisis MUSH (pretend that you didn't play during one of the super shitty eras for a moment) had a +gripes system, and from the staffers I knew who dealt with it, I know that they largely used it to catalogue patterns of behavior to see if someone was actually a problem or not. It was an anonymous system, and in my experience the people who mostly complained about it were problem players who didn't think they were problem players and thought there was a vast conspiracy against them or some bullshit.

The major downside of such a thing is when you actually -do- have toxic players who will abuse such a thing, though in that case I feel like you should honestly have some handle on the culture of your own game and know what's happening in it (which is incidentally something that a +gripes system helps with). The other downside is that such a system doesn't work with horribly corrupt and shitty staff, but then I'd repeat what someone else here has said: Why would you be playing a game with shitty staff anyway?

I get that putting up with shit-tier staffing is a WoD norm, but like, it's not something that you are under any obligation to do. I personally refuse to play a game where I can't trust staff, I don't give a shit how many of my friends are on it.

I'm kind of fascinated by the fact that in recent years, a lot of WoD games have become quite sane now that people have started doing things like not putting literally every sphere into one game, and like, have general mission statements about building a healthy community with good conduct and player relations and such.

I feel like we're at a point where if you choose a game that's just an overall toxic environment, when there are other options now, it's pretty much masochism if you stay somewhere you don't wanna be. But if you enjoy that, sure, go ahead.

edit: I'll play in a toxic environment if I can play Beast, because I just learned what it is, and the crashing and burning will be a hilarious trade off.

I wanted to pipe in on the PrP stuff.

I absolutely fucking love running plot and doing storylines and such, but I have literally never done a PrP on a WoD game. I've also never done it on a few other games for similar reasons.

The simple fact of the matter is, like, it always feels like there's a million hoops to jump through, a million rules to pay attention to, then I have to adjust this, adjust that, pay attention to this minor random ass thing, and etc. It's just, like, fuck it by that point, in my opinion. Literally the only reason that I've never run a PrP in a WoD game, despite actually finding the themes interesting enough for plot, is that it's just too much freaking trouble.

There are games outside of WoD with similar hoops, and I'm also like fuck it. While I throw WoD under the bus for being backward on an OOC level a lot, this is definitely not a WoD unique thing.

But, as I usually preach, don't say "this doesn't work" without adding an alternative, so I am going to explain what I do like.

My absolute favorite place to run plot on was Multiverse Crisis MUSH (back when I played it). Now, I know people who are familiar with the older eras of it are probably like "Get that shit outta here!", but the game actually allowed for very cohesive and long-term plot, and contrary to popular belief, you can't just go do whatever the hell you want and it just doesn't matter.

The system for doing a plot on MCM was this (I'm roughly paraphrasing with my own language, so bare with me if anyone from MCM happen to see this):

1. You had low tier one-shot plot scenes which didn't really require any staff input. So like, you do a raid or whatever, and its consequences don't really reach beyond that scene, no permanent alterations and such (beyond general character development, obviously).

2. Low tier stuff with permanent alterations, like you get a new sword or a power or something. This would require a simple filling out of the plot template to explain your intent and plans. It was pretty quick and painless.

3. Mid-tier stuff that affects, say, a small town.

4. High-tier stuff that affects an entire world.

5. Global stuff that affects multiple worlds (it is a multi-theme game, after all).

I most likely got some of that wrong, but this is the overall intent. The jist is that permanency, scope, and intent were the three defining factors of running stuff. I rarely actually used the plot application, because a lot of the time what I wanted to do was beneath the scope of that, though still ran for multiple scenes, because staff were flexible and generally understood if a plot truly had far reaching consequences beyond the characters involved or not.

When I did do applications, I didn't have to worry about a bunch of minor details and keeping track of a million things like some kind of insane bureaucracy. MCM's policies have changed a lot now, so I don't really know what the current stuff is like, but I know that when I played, it wasn't like this huge daunting wall separating me from wanting to do plot (unless I stupidly made it complicated and created a wall for myself).

I think that in MUing, and often even outside of MUing, there's an emphasis on writers and coders, but very little emphasis on designers. This is an experience I've had across many spectrums of the hobby, even outside of WoD and such. The only area of the hobby that I personally played in that actually started to put an emphasis on quality of life code and presentation were the Megaman MUSH/Super Robot Taisen/Multiverse Crisis MUSH circles back in like 2009 (for MCM it was more like 2012, but I digress) when they realized everything kind of sucked. Some other places are starting to do that and experiment too, because it's the logical step to take.

Writers generally focus on, well, plot and all that, writing stuff. Coders generally focus on efficiency and just making things work, but for a coder, what "works" can be far removed from what non-coders think works. In our hobby, there is very little emphasis on ease of use, the end user experience overall, and there is especially no real emphasis on how presentation and common sense policy can impact that.

People worry a lot about "how can I put this fire out/keep this fire from happening" and "how do I make this work". But there needs to be thought put into "how many steps can I eliminate from my code/policy to get to the bare minimum that still achieves the function I desire?", and "how can I enhance the end user experience with presentation and abstraction?"

I know I went beyond the scope of PrPs, but these are issues I have encountered all over the hobby. I have often had ideas shot down simply because people couldn't understand how super minor changes could impact the experience of the game. There is a prevailing belief of "if it's functional, it's fine", rather than "there's always room for improvement".

Imagine if no one questioned the functionality of the first toilet.

Your MUs are this:

When they could be this:

@surreality I've played Arx, I actually consider it a pretty fun game, but I never got very deep into it or tried to run a plot. I got super busy (this was when my GED stuff was happening) and sick (months of being killed by undiagnosed allergies, double pink eye and double ear infections all at once), and fell out of it.

Something I'm doing with the game I'm gonna make is creating a design document. I'm actually looking at video games and RPG systems. Having been a writer on a tabletop book really changed my perspective on a lot of things, so I think that if I'm going to seriously make a game that fits my ideals, I need to create a very serious design document. I think such a document, a bible of intent and specification, is exactly the sort of thing that keeps staff on the same page.

Obviously I don't expect everyone to do this, because this is supposed to be a hobby of fun and such, not work, but I think people could even get away with making just a short five page Google doc or something, with their game fully fleshed out, even what they want the grid to be, before they even lay down a line of code.

@bored I've been on 100+ games and I can assure you that this behavior is the minority, being decent and not a literal monster is not some unique special snowflake thing.

There's always at least one or two shitty players, but for most of a game being that way? Yeah, no.

If it bothers you that toxic behavior isn't the norm, then I don't know what to tell you.

I do, however, find your exaggerated pessimistic outlook on human behavior to be rather depressing, so I'm gonna eject.

@deadculture Jesus Christ.

I'm out. If we hit WORA vibes any harder, Cirno's gonna come back, more stoned than ever.

I definitely don't think it matters where the abuse comes from. Like, when you start splitting hairs like that, where would you draw the line?

People get fired for horrific racism from their jobs all the time, even if that racism didn't happen on the job. And while some people would argue that jobs should protect freedom of speech or whatever, why is a company going to risk both bad publicity and a possibly toxic work environment for everyone else?

Harassment is harassment, being horrible is being horrible. It's not staff's responsibility to do anything about stuff that happens outside of a MU, that much I will say, but it's certainly their prerogative, and in some cases I would say it's in their best interests. Staff can and should do whatever they want/can to protect their players, to say otherwise, in my opinion, is mostly an arbitrary restriction.

@Ganymede Oh yeah, no doubt about that. I once wrote a long ass article on this topic because people kept being just absolute fucking garbage to my Asian-American friends about their opinions re: Ghost in the Shell and Iron Fist. But I removed it because it was just kind of a really mean-spirited tone and I didn't think it would be educational (though people who agreed with it, liked it).

As a part of research for doing the article, I found that there have only been 27 shows in American history with Asian leads, and I'm willing to guess that not all of them were something we should be proud of as a country >_>.

@Derp Oh no I certainly agree with you about tropes. But I think there's a difference between tropes and stereotypes, much like there's a difference between tropes and cliches.

No fictional character is necessarily a 100% 1:1 copy of a real human being, but much like playing an FC, having the overall essence is important. And even then, it's like, just because you're playing a black person or any other race, doesn't mean you have to be like "Alright I'm going to do this grand philosophical expression of culture".

Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction, or his portrayal of Nick Fury, mostly by virtue of Samuel L. Jackson's personality, are essentially tropes that wouldn't come off the same if he wasn't black. Basically tough black badass action dude. It's fun and you don't really think about it, and while some could possibly argue that these are stereotypes, I think the overall positive intent is where the line is drawn.

It's much like a joke. The difference between a joke about race and a racist joke, something that people really bad at understanding comedy don't know the difference between.

A joke about race is when you make a joke on the topic of race, which may just have the punchline of being a funny anecdote about your culture or something, or maybe the punchline is about something racist but the thing you're laughing at is how stupid the racism is, or the person doing it, or just the overall wrongness of the situation. The point of the joke overall doesn't have negative intent, you're laughing -with- the race rather than necessarily at it.

A racist joke is where the punchline has negative intent, and yes the line can be thin, because shockingly comedy is goddamned hard. But like, let's take an Adam Sandler movie for example. There's one movie, I forget which, where Adam Sandler is just walking through a building. There's a Mexican guy sleeping, and like, the entire scene and how it's setup is that the entire punchline of the joke is that this character is a lazy Mexican. I don't think there's any dialogue or anything, you're just supposed to think this lazy Mexican is hilarious, because that's how it's set up.

If your racial tropes have positive intent, I think that more often than not you'll be on the right track. Most tropes that are just obviously offensive would be known enough to avoid anyway. And one thing to remember is that there is literally nothing you can do that won't offend someone. I'm sure my Fear and Loathing character somehow would offend someone. You can't make everyone 100% happy, but you can certainly make most reasonable people happy. I can probably look at every black character in fiction and find a way to deconstruct some sort of problem with them.

The reason for that is because there's a certain point where you forget that not every single person is going to be the same, not everyone is going to be a perfect representation of your race, even other people in your race, because a "perfect" representation of your race is extremely subjective. A lot of modern internet discourse seems to hinge on the belief that there is a perfect way to be black, or a perfect way to be a woman, or a perfect way to be this or that. But that's simply not the case. There's no perfect way to be anything, which is why there are a wide variety of ways to portray someone.

But when it comes to portraying someone in another culture, ultimately what you want isn't perfection, what you want is respect. If you respect what you're portraying, I think you'll avoid 99% of issues. Tarantino isn't perfect and sometimes he can be a hilariously uncomfortable man when it comes to race, but he's respectful and respects what he's trying to portray, and that goes a veeeery long way.

@ThatGuyThere Except that you're entirely marrying yourself to the technicalities of how the words should work rather than how the words are actually used, which is pretty much a gross misunderstanding of language.

I no doubt agree that "America" is not technically the name of the country, and yet I'm going to continue to refer to the US as "America", because it's a commonly accepted way to refer to the country, to the point that "America" is a commonly accepted word for the US in multiple languages. Getting bogged down by such a technicality to the point that it "irks" you would be like me being irked by the fact that you're colloquially using the word "hell" in a way that technically makes no sense, which would be a real argument I could make if I decided to entirely ignore how language works too.

You know what does irk me?

When people who have no clue how language works talk about technicalities that don't actually apply to everyday dialogue all the time, as if suddenly having complete and utter cultural blindness to their own language, for reasons that could only be described as "no goddamned reason", or "I like to think I'm a really smart dude, surely no one can deconstruct what's wrong with my argument, it's not like languages are a science or anything".

You know damned well how the term African-American is commonly used, just like you know damned well how the terms "America" and "American" are commonly used. You can be irked all you want, and I'll just be irked by the fact that you don't seem to understand the fundamentals of what I assume is your native language.

I'm gonna wash my hands of it because it's dumb as shit.

Shockingly, Fear and Loathing uses social combat as it's generally supposed to be used, without any apparent drama over it. This is so far the best WoD game I've played by a wide margin.

I had to leave a staff team before a game even properly opened, because a staffer absolutely hated and openly admitted to bias against OCs, but no one wanted to fire this person. I found it unacceptable.

While I'm not a headwiz yet, there is one thing I've learned from my time doing literally anything creative, especially things like making characters and such.

You have to learn to trust yourself at some point. Like, I seek out advice a lot, but in the past I used to take advice as absolute law, and I'd often end up less happy as a result. I wouldn't trust myself creatively because people would seem to know more than me about what we're doing.

But ultimately, even though some things are definitely good to keep in mind and are even essential, there are core aspects of your ideas that you really need to have confidence in, or you won't be happy compromising on those things.

I personally think it's a mistake to look at the hobby as people aging, since I pretty much constantly see newer and younger people entering.

I think it's about what you make and how you make it. And most of what it seems like people are making right now are sandboxes. Just because people are making a certain type of game, doesn't necessarily mean that's what the majority of people want or are going to play. Sandboxes just happen to be easy to run, and if you do it in the right way, you get lots of players.

I've harped on ways to design a game to get a specific type of player you want forever. People almost never design a game for the kind of player they want, I can count the number of times I've seen this out of hundreds of games on one hand. So if you make a canon game, a WoD game, or whatever, and don't get players who want to invest in the metaplot, it's most likely because the game isn't set up and run in a way to attract the sorts of players who would invest. You see this all the time.

I've mentioned in another thread, I forget which, that minor things matter and go a long way to creating a particular culture and community. More often than not, people say fuck those minor details, and people get the result that I've come to expect. United Heroes is an excellent example of building the game for the playerbase you want, and paying attention to the minor details, and, shock, they're succeeding.

If you want to make one of these canon games work, then build it in a way that will actually work. Designing a MU isn't just a random gamble where you just throw stuff together and then hope for a result. Think back to all the MUs you've played and what impact that minor details, policy, and features had on the playerbase and culture. After you do that, start figuring out what features will get you the game that you want, then do it.

I've never seen a game fail or succeed for no reason, or for whatever is the pessimistic flavor of the month reason that people are pointing out. There's always a bunch of specific reasons that you can pin down and replicate, and when people do pin down and replicate those reasons, either good or bad, they get the same result as the last people who did it, without fail. If you think that they don't, chances are you're overlooking a vital detail that differentiated the failed game from the successful game.

@Thenomain

The lack of importance on UX that so many coders seem to have is why the vast majority of "finished" systems we have in this hobby are a complete mess.

I think that if you need tons of files on how to use a tool rather than what to use a tool for, it's a design failure.

That said, I have no idea what's being discussed, I just came in here to say that.

Lords and ladies political MU set in the Nine Hells.

Tons of TS, death, reincarnation, betrayal, and the antagonists are like angels and heroes of destiny from the mortal world, and other crazy shit.

God I want this game so bad and I know no one would play it if I made it.

@Thenomain I've jumped all over this thread and I just can't make any sense of it. It seems like two groups of people speaking entirely different languages and hoping to be understood

I feel like this would all be solved if everyone just agreed to make a MOO, somewhere in between a MUD and a MUSH.

RPI Hell MOO.

Thanks, I'll check this forum out.