Posts made by Tempest

@Kanye-Qwest said in POLL: Super Hero MU Gut Check:

@tempest Ok but brucilla is actually a pretty interesting name.

You monster.

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

They are saying "take these elements and incorporate them into other games".

So why haven't you guys done it yet? I'm sure Ganymede could get somebody to install nWoD vampire code somewhere.

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

Your ignorance is showing. Shav closed the game because she did not want anyone else to have what she invested so much time into. She did not want to watch it fall apart. I literally offered to take it over, and would have dropped my PC if I had to. And players willingly surrendered their privilege to hold important pieces of power towards the end to help Shav out. I didn't initially surrender because my PC had become a lynchpin in the power structure, and pulling him out would have probably done more harm than the good I could do behind the scenes.

I think you have some rose-tinted glasses on or something, because this was not at all the discussion that was occurring back when the game actually closed.

RIP WORA.

I think a small handful of spheres is okay, as long as staff does some work to give them reasons to interact.

The problem IMO is when you start allowing everything, just to allow it, and the setting is just 'oh yeah there's 500 types of supernatural creatures all doing their own random shit in this town'.

@Lisse24 said in Active Games Of The Now?:

@Tempest How would you quantify active?

Reach 10+ players somewhat regularly? Not to say it requires 10+ /average/ log ins.

@Thenomain said in Indicating Discomfort in a Scene (online):

I think PvP became more of a social stigma in the WoD circles so its use diminished, but it still exists here and there.

I think, in my 5~ years of WoDing, I've seen a whopping two instances of genuine Player Killing.

And both left a pretty foul taste in my mouth for different reasons.

I'd love to just see a compiled list of every moderately active MU, if anybody is bored.

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

Question: If staff involvement is so damned critical to the success of the game...

...why do MUDs have magnitudes more players connecting to them, having fun?
...why do MMOs find success?

I fail to agree that staff intervention and chaperoning a game is a required element for plots, story and RP. People RP without staff support on Shangrila, and even have long-running actual RP plots with multiple people, generated entirely from RP.

The difference is, I think, that a WoD game is so over-powered that serious game destruction ability is in the hands of most of the average players.

1. Because MUDs and MMOs have 'things to do'? I can't go kill a hobgoblin on Fallcoast by typing 'n, n, n, n, w, open w, w, w, d, cave, n, n, kill hobgoblin, get all corpse'.

Staff involvement isn't critical to success. Certain types of staff involvement (running side plots/etc multiple times a day for individual players) are sure going to make your road to success easier though.

Example, I played a Gangrel on RfK briefly. I wanted to get a crocodile (or alligator, I forget) as one of my Protean animal forms. Shav randomly offered to run me a scene of my vampire hunting down and wrestling a crocodile. It was great.

1. Players love that kind of shit. It makes them feel special and like they're the star.
2. Almost none of us have the patience or desire to constantly be running that kind of 1-on-1 shit for mediocre players we don't know. Most of us (literally 99.99%) don't run that kind of shit ever.

@Ganymede You are seriously fooling yourself if you think an RfK-style game would work without a staffer who has massive loads of time to devote to a game she isn't playing.

Like that was pretty much the entire reason behind any success RfK had.

Go quit your job and start spending 12 hours a day playing 'judge' on a vampire game where you have no character. Bam you made a good vampire game.

I'm not bashing on Shav. She did great.

You guys going 'why isn't anybody trying to make a game like RfK' are missing the obvious issue though.

Didn't Shav eventually shut it down because nobody else wanted to staff and have political restrictions on their characters? Nevermind not playing characters at all. Yes, people wanted to 'take over' but not at the expense of their IC funtimes on their character.

@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.

If you do a more 'narrative' style of just traits/etc (personally what I prefer, unless you are going /hardcore/ crunch. I like crunch. I hate these shitty mediocre in-between things like FATE.), I feel like you can have all of the "character sheets" done on wiki, which minimizes a lot of the code needed, I would think.

IMO, the only 'beneficial' reason to why, is I think to prevent Shenanigans.

Monday, Jim is on Planet Exdee doing Z. Tuesday, he's halfway across the universe PKing Jane with his friend because something happened while he was doing Z and she HAS TO DIE RIGHT NOW.

It's a bad example, but I think everybody knows what I mean.

Overall, I think we all know there's not really any good reason for it (unless you're a serious stick in the mud, not necessarily a bad thing, but being a stickler on some stuff is just boring), but it's kind of 'left in place' because a lot of MUers have no real 'filter' when it comes to stuff.

There's stuff a lot of us will go 'uh yeah that makes no sense, stop that', but there's always the handful of people who will (ab)use things to the utmost limit possibly imaginable and for anti-fun things if there's not actual rules telling them to knock it off.

Basically, the same reason a lot of rules/etc get implemented. Some small handful of people fucked everything up for the rest of us and it's easier to have broad rules than have to deal with every specific situation as staff.

I legit laughed at this. The style/role thing got me.

How about an update to 2e?

What's the Brotherhood doing during this time?

Most of the allure in an X-Men specific game is being able to play the X-Men and Brotherhood off each other. They can antagonize each other, but also work together for particularly dire situations. And they can do social scenes with people trying to manipulate/recruit/etc each other.

It seems like something that'd be very 'healthy' for the game and would inspire a lot of RP without Staff always having to shove plot forward.

Without that dynamic, I have to say, an X-specific game seems like a waste of time/effort.

Sudden flashbacks to The Reach having to actually implement rule for length of time after approval before you can be involved in PK due to Javier(?) getting somebody to app in and help him kill Shane. (The fight scene was like 30 minutes post-approval, iirc.)

Good times.

@Arkandel said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Lisse24 said in Sin City Chronicles:

@Coin Conflict of Interest on a political game can be troubling, as one player attempts to manipulate things to their own advantage. I can also see why what you posted about might be interpreted as potentially squicky by staff, and maybe they'd want to protect you from being pressured into doing something or pressuring someone else? Other than that, I don't see the issue.

Unfortunately CoI and players OOC maneuvering on behalf of their PCs is as incredibly common as it is impossible to chase down due to how widespread it is. Metagaming in political games is probably my top peeve in MUSHing, yet I recognize it's awfully hard for staff to intervene on something that's basically impossible to not just prove but ultimately even reasonably know happened.

The heart of the issue to me is that people have friends - OOC friends - and they like playing with these OOC friends, something which can convey advantages when that neonate hangs out with the Prince all the time because they OOC love playing together. Access itself is an advantage, regardless of the nature of that relationship.

Yet what can be done about this? What should be? In most cases absolutely nothing, and the line that separates impropriety from perfectly acceptable behavior is very blurry and subjective.

There's no real way to deal with this, I don't think.

The guy who always has 2 friends app in with him is always going to have an advantage with him over the loner. Unless the group of 3 makes 0 effort to make outside connections or something, but even then, the lone person has an uphill battle even if they all start together on day 1.

This gets incredibly messy (imo) on multisphere games because it's no longer Joe and his Friends playing a coterie of vampires. It's Joe now having easy access to members of other spheres, because they're played by his friends.

The only real CoI stuff I've ever seen is the result of the above. It's people who already OOCly play with each other all the time, playing with each other across every character and mixing and matching them.