I admit, every time I staff I say it's the last time I'll play a Mush. Then I realize it's where the people I know are, and I enjoy solving challenges.
Yeah, I said I'd never code again and there was Eldritch. And then BitN. And now something else. And Mage. And dammit, coming up with easier UX and better methods and hopefully an easy installer is fun.
But seriously, this is the last time.
Sure, Theno. Sure.
Pissed off that a friend just passed away from heart failure this afternoon.
Not really sure what I'm angry at. But I'm angry.
I find it's the unfairness of the Universe and the inability to do a damn thing about it.
My best to you and their survivors.
We're talking about the same thing. In Mushes, knowing who is a vampire and where they are means mobbing them with your Werewolf friends. Talking openly about secrets because they are in another language means that people don't know about your sordid past if you don't want them. No, we're talking about the same kinds of secrets. I'm talking about it from a code aspect because to me, code is probably what people are going to lean on to have systems for having and discovering secrets. (Spy code. Invisibility code. Eavesdropping systems.)
I don't think that Mush is otherwise adverse or antagonistic towards the "secretly a serial killer" kind of secret, but to keep it a secret from other players is a trick. Keeping it a secret from other characters is easy. Doing the latter without worrying about the former is one of culture, trust, and responsibility.
Not code.
I repeat this to everyone reading this thread: NOT CODE.
Never in my twenty-some odd years in this hobby have I ever seen code stop people from abusing information, or complaining about unfairness.
A note to Qwest: I recall that I wanted to say I agree with you on something, but not what. You sounded like you were saying MUDs were better than Mushes because "at least MUDs aren't unfair". Anyhow, truce.
Lies. MGMT was always that bad no matter what kind of day it was.
See, what you're trying to do is make a statement of fact, and statements of fact can, and should, be tested. Facts can be right and wrong. Or both.
I don't disagree with you because of who you are--in fact, after our colossal misunderstanding a few months ago I was giving you more support than I give most people because of who they are--but because I disagree with the foundations of your argument.
Not your opinion, your argument. This has nothing to do with opinion. In fact, I find boiling everything down to opinion to be dangerous, and part of the problem that has let Intelligent Design push its way into classrooms. Boiling things down to opinion means that they can be dismissed, even if what they're dismissing is not really opinion.
I'm going to let Ganymede to the heavy logical lifting on this topic, but I was having problems biting my tongue.
To the person I promised I wouldn't do this, sorry. I tried to remain in the realm of reason.
I think you're putting "babysitting" in the lap of staff. I believe the #1 goal of staff is to facilitate the fun-having, with a stress on facilitate. Staff is capable of reacting to problems that they know about, but it's not uncommon that "this person has 15 alts" is first known when they all hit super-idle at the same time. You think it's easy to track alts? Sure, if you stay on top of it, it's possible, but enough groups of friends and housemates game together to hit a fair share of false-positives, enough people game from multiple locations to make tracking harder.
The easiest way for staff to resolve issues like this is not to set up a complex alt-tracking system and threaten banning anyone caught not using it (which I've seen), but to put an alt limit on it first and if that doesn't work then upgrading the staff-running resources when it becomes a problem.
I'll admit, I don't know how we got to this particular argument, but I don't see the problem with saying, "Hey, three characters per player, and no rotating characters once per month." New character creation is taxing on staff too, you know, and responding to a response of yours in another thread, both staff and players have to work together to make the game run smoothly.
I can deal with getting shit for playing on a game I'm staffing, because either they're right or wrong. If they're right, I apologize and fix it. If I'm wrong, I tell the player that they need to stop whatever it is they're smoking and chill the fuck out.
As @Sunny said elsewhere, it's up to both staff and players to make a game work. I will say it's up to staff to set the expectations of the players, but it just takes one know-it-all with their own staffing ideals to come in and make a stir to give the nearest staffers a chain-migraine, passing from staffer to staffer until someone can step in and stop it.
Now, on the perfect game that person will be the first staffer on the scene, but we're humans. We all want to play our own games. So on a realistic game, that person is probably going to be another player.
Ah! And so Thenomain loops the tangent back to the original topic.
With a core set of players, emotional flare-ups are mitigated. Hopefully with "hey, stop that and come over here to play this awesome scene". Unmitigated, they can end up as negative feedback loops in the OOC Lounge. (And he keeps tying it all together, folks!) One player or staffer saying, "Hey, this isn't cool," one player or staffer passionate about the game and willing to help others, then the negative gets nullified and possibly turned around. "Hey wow, these people enjoy their game. I should try enjoying it too."
Yeah yeah, that doesn't always work, but that's why I used the phrase "critical mass", a more organic term to describe that tipping point, where even the nay-sayers aren't going to cause a stampede away from your game.
And let's not forget Brus' #1 Rule of Mushing: Chill the fuck out.
Once you're chill, you can sort through a lot more stuff than when you're not. Like: Someone giving you grief for playing a character on your own game. As long as you're creating fun, or at least not absorbing fun, then nobody should care. I'm going to posit that if they still care, they're wrong.
[mod voice]
Guys, this thread is in the Constructive board. Keep it civil or I put this whole thread in the Mud Pit, and I liked the conversation up until then so I'd rather not.
You know, this just occurred to me.
All of the games I know that were more successful than their kin kind of had one thing in common:
Not staff, but players. Hey y'all, come on by, let's socialize and talk about the game and play a little. Sure, you build this, you build that, etc.
Many of them were migration games. "Hey people I know I'm making this game over there because I love this game but I want to do something new so come check it out." Many of them were like that, the more I think about it, but I believe all of them were never soft-opened, were never carefully constructed then opened, they were just ... open.
Something I'm going to be thinking about.
Prediction: This thread will be about how entitlement is bad and specific examples about how people have acted in an entitled manner. No debate about if entitlement is bad will take place.
Exception: Ganymede will make a probative statement about either definition or practice, and will largely be ignored.
@Arkandel said in Necessary tools for running plots as a non-staff player?:
The code used in most nWoD MU* these days (it could be @Thenomain's, I'm not sure) works really well.
Basically the Storyteller does something like +event/create Orcs attack!=<Synopsis>/<datetime> which gives it an id, announces it game-wide and adds it to a list players can review with +events. So if it's #3, they can then sign up for it with "+event/signup 3. Once the date is past it's taken off the list.
Very Important Note:
This code belongs to @Cobaltasaurus, from start to finish. Her concept, her code, her updates. I've added comments and suggestions and when she disappeared for RL I've done some bug-fixing and Thenoisms, but events code is Cobalt's contribution to the hobby.
That is all.
@Ganymede said in Plotted versus plotless scenes:
I mean, it's really as simple as "Shrike is an Arrow that enacts street justice! Come join!" And we get our kicks by just playing pretend.
Cannot upvote this enough.
I miss it when people don't recognize this. So many meaningful yet "plotless" things can happen when you stop relying on "plot".
I really don't want to be singled out for helping code things. I code WoD, which is one of the most convoluted, intricate, and annoying system I've ever coded. 7th Sea was a hundred times easier to code, and I imagine D&D is likewise. I want people to rely more on simple systems and creativity than this kind of thing, but here we are.
I rather hate that people rely this heavily on code to make a game. It makes the barrier of entry so damn high, and I promised @Chime that if she made her Modernized Moo, I would code all over it. I think she's calling it Squidcat. Or Squishy. I don't know, but I want it.
I also want a hot librarian nerd girlfriend. One of these things may happen before the other.
The point there is we've been leaning heavily on WoD, when we don't really need to. It's where our friends are, though, and so it's where we're going to find one another.
My baseline for code legibility is @Cobaltasaurus. For everyone who says, "I don't understand code," I point to her. She was still saying it when she coded +events. When I was coding WoD stuff, I would point her to things and say, "Does this make sense?" If it did, I was on the right track.
I don't think I'm part of any such Rennaisance, tho. I think it's everyone. Either people are frustrated enough at one thing to branch out, and bring their friends with them. Their friends excite other friends. We're getting excited about ideas, interested, and that's what makes this work. Believe me, if you had nothing but a room and some exits people can use, you'd end up with as big of a game as your extended social network. Roanoke drew people to The Reach because people really like Roanoke. Sure, Haunted Memories had run its course, but if I had opened a new WoD game, I wouldn't have had anything near the response.
I'm a cheerleader of new ideas, though. Coming up with good ideas isn't easy, and that's where I try to support them in the way that is good for them; occasionally tweaking bugs, offering what code I have, helping its installation, and so forth. It's what I can do, and that means it's what I will do.
Other people write theme, run plots, keep us even-keeled. They should get as much thanks. They're almost as rare as coders.
Here I am going to extensively agree with you:
I believe that the first group in the space gets the set. They pass it along to the next incoming group, and so on and so forth. This doesn't mean that an incoming group or person can't say, "Can we have it raining instead?" (To which most people will almost certainly say, "It wasn't earlier, but sure, it could be now!" Try to say yes before saying no.)
I also agree 110% that it's rude to enter a scene and not wait for a simple update. In my circles, we wait for a round of poses (assuming only 3 or so people to wait for), but the next poser tends to fill in. Pages are also quite a good way to send a basic situation report to incoming people.
It all starts with the people who were first in the play-space. They made the first effort, so I sincerely believe that anyone who arrives after should respect their initial set.
Continuing to agree with you, and I'd also like to agree with @Ghost.
Trust starts OOC. In some game systems, trust is maintained by the system or by the table. In Mu*s there is rarely a strong sense of "the table" (aka the game) and therefore a far more tenuous sense of trust.
What @Ghost describes is a betrayal of trust. How can you trust other people if they page their friends to manipulate the situation in their favor? But on the other hand, how can you build that trust if you don't share your gaming expectations with others, which can only be done OOC, aka "table talk"?
I'm not talking about scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment expectations, but the expectations and understandings that make up the game's culture.
I clearly don't think the problem is with OOC tools, but the use of the system, both IC and OOC, against other players.
@Ganymede said in Where's your RP at?:
Let death be a choice by players, and I think you meet everyone's expectations.
As it happens, John Wick made two RPGs that approach this question: 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings.
In 7S, it's up to the victim to decide if they're dead. In L5R, it's up to the attacker. 7S is a game about high adventure. L5R is a game about intrigue and stealth. In 7S, it'd suck if your high-flying Errol Flynn action made your character dead. In L5R, if you're that careless then maybe your character deserves to die.
Fate Core splits the difference: If it gets that far, your character is simply gone and you can decide if they're dead or have a chance of coming back later.
It's fun to look at the threat dial and its limitations based upon setting and theme, but I agree that in Mu*dom I'd rather have a negotiated outcome or the system to explicitly tell me what the drawback is, ones life or captivity is off the table.
I have a harder time thinking of existing properties where it'd be hard not to play within, and most of them have to do with either superheroes or fiction series that aren't very well fleshed out, which makes them about as well known as original theme anyhow.
--
WoD isn't horror most of the time anyway. Sadly.
I keep having staff ask for a LFRP flag, so someone must be using it. And a channel. And auto add to the channel when you set the flag. That person isn't me; the tools for finding RP are Who, Where, Hangouts, Directory, Map, Events, BBoards, and Faction Channels.
How do you keep the OOC Lounge from becoming trash? The same way you keep channels from becoming trash, the bboards, the scenes, and @mail: You stop the trash talk.
Players have some control over this, asking people to calm down or respect others, and for those who take that as their cue to troll you kick it to staff. If staff refuses to do anything about it, you've learned something about the staff on that game; not exactly a win-win but I'll take all the silver linings you've got.