Posts made by Tez

@Roz STOP

Edit: I would like to call to attention the fact that Roz's cats EARS are STUPID and have FRECKLES.

@Lisse24 @Ninjakitten While I'm not Sao or Roz, I do staff with them and was part of these conversations. Some of the things that surprised me that were a real problem for players are perfectly obvious things, in retrospect, like 'page' and 'look' -- and also what an @alias actually is. Is it an IC nickname? What? Terms like GM, TP, all of these words that are just part of our common lexicon leave new players going '???'.

The 'look' thing in particular jars me. I've used channel spawns for so many years that it never occurred to me just how many players were struggling with the fact that the instructions in the welcome room were getting scrolled right off the screen by the volume of the cheerful chatter on the Newbie channel.

Channels -- what they are, how they work, if they are IC / OOC -- are also a thing that gets to them. It seems to make sense to them when I talk about channels as chat rooms, and that you can be in multiple chat rooms with one account at the same time, but then trying to figure out how to explain to them that game is set up as a series of rooms, which is totally different than the chat room channels, that you navigate through by using exits never sounds as intuitive as it could be.

We do a lot of explaining to people just how to even connect and how to talk, on channels and in rooms: say, pose, emit, etc. People trying to connect and being greeted by white text on a black screen has apparently been incredibly intimidating for a good number of our players.

http://lostandfound.riverdark.net/wiki/Cheat_Sheet is the cheat sheet that was put together by one of our new-to-MUing staffers, who checked in with a couple of our other brand-new-to-MUing players. That's more of a list of commands that people who are already pretty well hooked need to look up than it is an onboarding list, though. Others have already said it, but the absolute best thing you can really do for onboarding is having people communicating with new players, and have a friendly, patient welcome crew. We're lucky in that we have an exceptional group of players for that.

@Coin Yeah, I definitely think that the first part of the post has a lot of good stuff to say, but look at the way we're referring to it now: the post on livejournal is called the 'Internet Drama and You' post, with Pretendy Fun Time Games being point 3, and points 1 and 2 being Perspective (Have It) and Passive Aggression (Don't Do It). (Both good ideas.)

It's point 3 that lingers, and point 3 that I often see referred to most. It's point 3 that's the title of this thread.

I'm with @mietze and @Three-Eyed-Crow: it's a good mirror to examine our own behavior, and a terrible excuse to hide behind when dealing with others.

OH BOY. The Pretendy Fun Time Games post.

While that post has some value, it has always rubbed me the wrong way. I've often seen it cited by the kind of person who will be a jerk, then turn around and tell people to chill out, it's just a game.

Yeah, it's a game, but it's important to recognize that we're a community of people coming together to play these games. I'll grant the importance of and meaning of community varies widely from game to game, but there are real people on the other end and they deserve a minimum of respect. You don't have to be BFF with everyone -- you really, really don't; cite your geek social fallacies here -- but you do have to not be a jerk*.

Rather than brushing everything off as 'chill out, it's just a game', I'd much prefer to come at it from the perspective of 'chill a little, we're all here to have fun'. It's a small distinction, but an important one.

--

*I tend to think you can be as much of a jerk as you want IC, as long as you balance it with an OOC awareness of it and respect for other players -- but we've got a whole other thread for THAT discussion right now, so I won't go into that any further.

@Coin

That's a reasonable point.

I can easily imagine one player ignoring the theme / mood / logic of a scene while other players are trying to have a different type of scene entirely. Sometimes keeping morale high for everyone means telling one person that they are being disruptive and to knock that shit off.

That said, making stupid decisions awesome doesn't always mean making them right. You can still fail in amazing ways. I'm pretty sure WoD even has that baked in to their systems, right? (I know nothing about WoD except what I've gleaned from this board.)

There is a lot of really good stuff in this thread that I won't rehash, but one of the bigger pieces that I don't think I've seen explicitly addressed by others is this:

A huge part of GMing is actually managing player morale.

A number of the points others have made tie into that issue, but for me it's worth keeping that in bold letters in your brain.

Going into GMing with the attitude that you are there so players have a good time can help keep you from some common GMing problems, including making story about your NPCs, 'punishing' players (seriously, this is terrible, but also hugely common; if players do something and you think it's stupid, think about how to make it awesome), and getting bogged down in your own cleverness and leaving players frustrated. You're there to help tell a story together, not hold an audience captive to tell your story.

Be enthusiastic -- or fake it, anyway. Having an excited, positive GM can make an otherwise lackluster scene still fun, and an unresponsive GM can make even the most awesome ideas in theory turn frustrating in execution.

Keep lines of communication open. Communicate before so that players know what to expect; communicate during so that players feel heard; communicate after so that players know they impacted things.

If it's appropriate for your setting / game culture, OOC communication can be an excellent way to keep a sort of behind-the-scenes flow going. I take time to encourage and be enthusiastic for players who take risks, especially when they might not always work out the way they expected. A lot of players can be very reactive, so when there is a player who is proactive, you bet I'm calling attention to that and holding them up like they are goddamn Simba.

AND HAVE FUN.

I've gone back and forth on this one, a little. Like @Jaded said, if you do fudge, I think you need to be up front about it. Like @Ganymede said, knowing your players and what they prefer is key.

When I was on Firan, I rolled openly whenever possible and never fudged rolls. When running games with friends, I'd fudge or toss out dice if they weren't doing what I wanted them to in the name of making players more awesome. On the Transformers game I staff now, I not only roll openly, but I've changed the code to be even more transparent.

A lot of this has more to do with the game culture, and the game history of the players, than it does my own feelings. Both Firan and (past) Transformer games had strong PvP elements and a real problem where players had good reasons not to trust staff. Unfortunately, GMs are all too often dealing with borderline hostile, mistrustful players -- and I can't really blame them. Players need to be able to trust you, which is why I shoot for transparency, first. If I'm gonna fudge, I'm telling them.

Definitely still alive!

The bulk of us tend to be in the US, and somewhere between 3:30 AM to 6:30 AM on a Sunday morning (depending on timezones!) is not what you would call prime time. Obviously. I went looking for our mudstats page to give you a better idea of our most active hours only to discover we don't have one yet, because the last game added was added 150 days ago.

A better measure of activity might be the logs page -- http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/Category:Logs -- and if you haven't checked out our consent policies, I would -- http://xfnyc.riverdark.net/wiki/RP_Policies#Consent. We're limited consent, which is a very fuzzy middle ground between pure consent and no consent.

Awesome. I looove FS3. Thank you so much for creating and sharing it. I use it on two different games, tweaked in various ways by myself or other staffers. Couple of things:

• I'm a fan of Quirks being thrown out, because we actually chucked Quirks on both games. (Sorry.)
• I'm a big fan of them being thrown out in favor of RP Hooks and Goals because I literally just made a +job for myself yesterday to add that to the approval system on one of the games.
• How are advantages dealt with in +rolls? Like action skills? They share the 1-5 rating but aren't mentioned under dice mechanics. Are they not meant to be rolled? You either have them to whatever level with whatever that means in the game in question, or you don't?
• Do ruling attributes (aptitudes, in this case!) still figure in for action skillls, expertise and interests, or is it something that you would pick per +roll? It must still be in the system for +combat, yeah?
• I'm curious why you dropped the rating scale / how this impacts XP & XP costs. I can see how it impacts the chargen costs, and that makes sense, but now it seems like XP can go a lot farther -- if it exists, and I'm not actually sure it does from your write up.

FS3 has been very flexible and customizable in my experience. We've contorted it in some crazy ways, and there are a lot of customization options built-in, and we've made full use of them. Some of the things that I'd like to see are things I'm sure I could add myself if I weren't so lazy, but are more combat than chargen related:

• Getting people to reset their armor and weapons every time we start a new combat scene is a minor pain, and having defaults set per player as something that players can change (and RP about changing) rather than gamewide defaults might simplify that.
• An easy option to make +combat/mod and +combat/lethality transparent: I tweaked our system to do so (and it wasn't that bad, since you had a couple of nice and obvious functions for displaying results; they use fun_combat_msg instead of fun_org_msg now).
• Maybe other things I'm blanking on right now but honestly it's been very easy to change / tweak / customize.

One thing I foresee as a potential problem (for us, anyway, if we switched systems, and I can already imagine @Roz twitching at the idea) is the rate of diminishing returns at high numbers of dice making it difficult to create an NPC that is a real challenge for players. I'm still trying to find the right balance on this with the old version of FS3 that we're using. Rather than having mobs of a large number of NPCs that PCs have to fight, I've got a GMing hangup about wanting to see players combine and work together to take down the big (robotic) monster. Any thoughts?

Thanks again! It's been a fantastic system.

No.

--

I was tempted to leave it at that, but I suppose I better clarify:

I hate spying. I hate spying commands. I hate logging commands.

I find it extremely hard to justify. Concerns about security don't really do it for me. It turns me off like nothing else on Earth if I know that a game has policies in place to support spying on players. The most common reason that I've seen is to prevent the abuse of code, but I'm not sure it's that effective. I have seen time and again players become staffers and the temptation is too much. They'll start flagging people suspect or dropping an observer on them or going dark or whatever the method is for the game for the silliest of reasons. It's nuts.

None of this is IC: ICly, I have played multiple spies, moles, etc. It's awesome. It's good fun. But doing so requires the kind of trust that OOC spying can shatter.

So, no. I've staffed on games that support it -- looking at you, Firan -- but every game I've ever built hasn't needed it, and we haven't had it.

I will add one more thing: the games I create tend to be OOCly open and communicative, pretty small (20, 30 players), PvE rather than PvP, with a game culture that encourages all logs to be posted. If a staff member / storyteller wants to keep their finger on the pulse of the game, it's not hard.

I understand in theory that it might not be the same for larger games, PvP games , games that don't post logs, etc. -- but I like the ability to be chill and open, and I have pretty strong feelings about avoiding games with OOC spying baked in like that as a player.

@Bobotron
Ha. Tell me about it. I was going through his Pose Prettifier the other day. It was dependent on other systems 3 layers back. I broke down and emailed him.

The Pose Order Tracker system above definitely does seem to depend on at least one other system. When I emailed Volund (who was very quick to respond; I do suggest emailing if you try it and run into problems), he said he was working on a version of his code that is better suited to install in pieces.

I eagerly anticipate that day. In the meantime, it's at least a place to start.

Volund has a pose order tracker than handled this pretty nicely in the brief time I used it:

This may or may not be the pose tracker I played with:
https://github.com/volundmush/mushcode/blob/master/Pose Order Tracker - POT.txt

And the rest of Volund's stuff is here:
https://github.com/volundmush/mushcode

That's pretty much what I've done: I swapped the dbrefs around on the +bbnew command I had her paste above, and we haven't had problems with it. That was def. an easy fix.

The +bbnext command, which is an entirely different command, just didn't work. Period. And it was not an easy fix -- or, who knows, maybe it was, but it was an easy fix that I could not see for the life of me. So I just lifted the +bbnew out of a Penn game running on FS3, switched the numbers, and dropped it in MUX and here we are. Everything has been happy.

So far.

(I feel like I just made all the real coders out there wince but eyyyyy.)

If we have trouble with it again, I'll def. take a look at your commands and slap them in. Thanks, @MrMaker.

Roz told me to stop making her post and come post myself, so:

• The +bbnext that she linked above which we were trying to use doesn't work.
• The +bbnew I told her to paste works fine now once I put the right numbers in.

Maybe.

Sometimes we've run into some weird issues as she described, but I can't reproduce it at the moment.

So, as Roz would say: ¯\(ツ)/¯