Best posts made by Tempest

I have nothing but for you both, but that is the flakiest headstaff combo possible.

Definitely interested.

P.S. Please limit alts, especially for the first couple weeks.

We recycle entire MUSHes.

IDC if characters get recycled, but once you're playing the exact same character, for extended periods of time, across every single MU you touch, and rarely playing anything else it's pretty damn eye-rolly.

Look, idgaf about the bans, good job those people are all fucking cancer and I'm sure the 1 person still around here that isn't part of their group agrees.

But what in the fuck.

@Ganymede I need the hogpit open for historical record keeping purposes.

How will the children ever understand my rise to the top of the forum wars?

My glory can not be buried like this!

Haven't done one of these yet, so let's see...

Firan : Gemma, Zeynasi, others including Nilara, Shade, Tia, Linni, Vinoria.

The Fifth World : Lucretia Cindravale

City of Fog and Blood : Lucretia, Zhen Ji

Game of Bones : Reyna

The Reach : Xiao, Cecilia

Wildcard : Nikita, Valette

Kingsmouth : Aoife

Darkwater (most recent version) : Catherine, Artemis

CoMux (or whatever it's called now) : Stint as Wolverine when it opened, now Domino & Spider-Woman.

Eldritch : Reina

Reno : Selina, Archer

Lots of various characters on places like Eternal Crusade/Game of Kings/etc that I CGd on and then usually immediately wandered away from.

I heard @Roz likes hockey and gifs.

@insomnia said in General Video Game Thread:

ALSO: The PC version clocks in at 100 Gigs... so there's that.

ETA : I despise, fucking despise, the notion of pay-to-play games that then also have loot boxes or something of the sort as a thing.

F2P with in-game purchases, or sell me a fucking video game. DLC is tolerable when it's real content that adds 10+ hours of gameplay or something. But stuff like loot boxes in a game I already paid for will flat out turn me off from a company forever more. You don't get to be a greedy fuck and double dip in my pocket.

@il-volpe said in The Metaplot:

as it has screwed you up when you were trying to RP something that interested you more?

This complaint genuinely baffles me. Not targetted at you, but I've seen other people make similar complaints over the years.

"I just want to play X, not be forced to deal with Y, ugh!"

Okay...go do your thing in the corner if you can find other people interested in it?

The problem arises when people expect the entire game around them to cater to the thing they want to do, and they get mad when it doesn't.

Now, aside from that.

I don't think anybody can flat out say metaplot is good or bad. There's plenty of bad ways to implement it. There's also plenty of good ways to do it and wind up with it not mattering.

And now on to a tangent.

Now the idea of a metaplot is, I think, generally to get players involved in the game and give them a reason to be doing things.

The problem here is metaplot doesn't really matter in that regard in my experience. Once upon a time, it might have served the purpose of being the lure to draw people to a game and get them interested in it, but those days appear to be 100% past us, IMO.

Giving players things to fight over (titles, territory) or having a culture where they can kill each other (thus fuelling the need to do a bunch of BaRP scenes and 'make allies') seem to be the two most important things to getting players "involved" and interested in "doing stuff".

Metaplot alone doesn't do the trick. Unless you are willing to invest a metric fuckton of time into running 3+ event-type scenes regularly a week. And even that might not do the trick. Because without 'titles' or something "on the line" to reward players for playing a game, they just will do absolutely nothing between your metaplot scenes and eventually lose interest in them, regardless of how amazing an ST you may or may not be.

@Arkandel said in L&L Options?:

In my personal opinion although you can base it all on a contested roll anyway it will cheapen and eat away at the source of what makes politics work - well depicted skill at getting people to do what you want them to. Yes - as you noted - this is subjective and yes it's dependent on the player's skill at posing a convincing, charismatic character but... that's just how it is. Oversimplifying the result by making it dependent on a single roll is not going to work, it'll do the exact opposite.

Almost none of us are real life swordfighters. If I'm fighting somebody and lose the combat rolls, I don't really care what the other person poses, unless it's some super egregiously stupid shit (which I could easily call them on and ask them to repose). And I'm not expected to "play along" with the other person's "demands" or anything.

Social and political stuff does not work like that. If you win a roll, but can't write to save your goddamn life, people are going to lose interest in playing with you, and in playing with their character, since they now have to go along with your awful shit because the dice said so.

@kanye-qwest

@apos said in FCs on Comic MUs:

That sounds basic but very few people want to deal with behavioral problems, and the ones that DO want to deal with it are very rarely the people that should be.

I'd honestly expand this to "very few people want to deal with problems that involve other people in any fashion whatsoever". And I believe this is one of the main problems in the hobby. The irony is not lost on me, either. But, for all the loud bitching I do around here, I have the self-awareness to realize that on-game, I should not be the person dealing with player-problems. At least not without having my +job responses/etc vetted by other staff first. Not to "brag", but a lot of fucking people lack that self-awareness.

This can also be expanded to the fact that generally, the people with the time & interest to run a MU are rarely the sort of people who should be. There are exceptions here. But good, decent staff like @Apos are the minority, by far. People like @Arkandel or whoever you want to hold up as a 'reasonable, good RPer and person' don't have the time to run a MU. Most of the time, the people running a MU are doing it for flawed reasons. They want to be popular. It's a replacement for a social life. They want to 'make friends' and then those friends become the 'favored players'. Or just simple shit like they want a GOMO.

The mentality around 'competing over FCs' is definitely probably a problem, but, let's be serious here. @Apos, I don't know how familiar you are with comic games, anime games, etc.

People camp characters like a mother fucker. If the rule is "one log posted a month", there are dozens of people who will take an alt, and regularly go 27 days with that alt offline, then log on, get in their 1 log, and disappear for another 25 days. And they're not breaking a rule....technically?

I for sure agree that the same character/player shouldn't be allowed to 'vote' (or whatever) for somebody else over and over. Especially depending on the tiers of what we're talking about. If a game has 100+ characters logged in, and Batman explicitly plays with even the same FIVE people over and over for 6 months straight, that's not okay. Nevermind how common it is for people to play with 1 or 2 people over and over.

Staff on these games are generally the core of the problem, because they do all this shit themselves, and between them and their friends each having 5 fucking alt slots, they've covered half of the high profile characters. If your BFF is playing Emma Frost on your game and she only logs on every two weeks to play with you, there are very, very, very few human beings in the MU community who are going to pull that character from their friend or tell and enforce them being more active in public. I've staffed multiple comic games. The other people on staff are why I quit every time. They inevitably want absurd shit that wouldn't get approved for a player, or constantly skirt around activity rules and get a 'pass' because "holy shit wow, there'd be drama if we talked to another staffer about that".

@Lisse24 said in Visit Fallcoast, sponsored by the Fallcoast Chamber of Commerce:

RfK has a lot of goodwill among its former players because it managed to avoid this and give its players plenty to do. However, the people building new WoD still seem to model them after the current games instead of looking at what made games like RfK work or how games in other genres manage to keep players involved.

Please stop bringing up RfK.

Until you can find me a staffer who is going to dedicate 10 hours every single day to RPing NPCs and running plots for everybody on their game. And 5 more hours on that same day handling various +jobs.

All while not playing an actual PC on their own game.

Any game will "succeed" if you have staff slavishly running stuff 24/7 for players.

As for what @Rook said, personally I put a lot of the onus on WoD players and MUers in general, more than the games.

The vast majority of MU'ers appear to be incredibly lazy and entitled when it comes to making little effort to get involved in things and expecting everybody else to feed them story. And it has to be a specific kind of story usually, or they'll complain about how it doesn't fit their character.

Character 'power level' is a problem tied to MUers being spoiled brats. You literally do not ever need 100+ xp in 2e nWoD, yet I constantly see players talking about how they need like 150 xp to 'finish their character' or some absurd shit. Yes, at 100+ xp, any character in any splat is basically god.

Around 50 xp, not so much. The main exception I'm aware of being a Mage who drops literally all their XP on getting gnosis5, and arcana to 5, and another arcana or two to 4. (I don't know Demon or Beast, maybe they're as bad.)

Games need to limit advancement more often. People don't need infinite XP and it fucks your game up. Players need to stop being whiny bitches 'wah wah what about my character growth'. Fuck literally anybody who's ever said that. Your character's "growth" is not limited to XP spends, and it shouldn't be infinite.

Pick a power level you want your game to be played at, and set a cap there.

Players need to be more willing to consider running their own stories and be more involved in the ones that are already available.

Plot breeds RP and staff aren't the only people who can do things. And they shouldn't have to shove story down player's throats.

The entire MU community feels very 'passive' lately.

@faraday said in Genosha (Interest Poll):

@tempest I think an entire industry of movie and game trailers

I'm going to be lazy. Just imagine a facepalm GIF here.

These aren't video games or movies.

I don't get invested in spending my energy creating things when I see a trailer for The Witcher 4 (not real, I know). That's just something I look forward to experiencing, not something I have to help build as a player.

If we were talking about MUDs, even, I wouldn't be saying this. A MUD, you log on, go clear some zones, practice your skills, wtfever. Those are actually like video games.

MUSHes are reliant on the players being excited to help BUILD the game, create stories, etc. That excitement is pretty hard to bottle up and extract, and is needlessly wasted by these posts about "we're gonna open an XYZ game in 6 months", IMO.

On hero games, I think 1 or 2 is the most you should get.

Especially on hero games.

Anything more than that, and you get into characters not being available for new players, because somebody else has them and does 1 scene every 2 weeks with them.

I'd rather somebody do 2 scenes a week on one character than 1 scene a week on 2 characters.

If I play Psylocke, Ms. Marvel, and Sif, yeah those are all pretty different in focus and they're even all in different 'spheres', none of them are even 'leadership' types, but goddamn I as 1 player just put a huge fucking dent in the available female FCs.

@Misadventure

It's almost as if years of MUSHing have proven that most staffers are shitty.