Posts made by Thenomain

@Roz said:

@Thenomain said:

The second is that all new players are introduced to the game. I want to mention the AetherMUX quiz and casual newbie channel again. They also had reccs read by other players, so everyone had a chance to see everyone saying good things about everyone else. The game did not just expect a positive atmosphere, it created one.

I am interested in learning more about this!

I've mentioned this a few times in a few threads, so the simple version:

At the end of chargen, you put a room with a quiz in it. The questions are like:
"Werewolves bite people to determine their supernatural species." (Answer: No.) Or: "Which Changeling Seasonal Court is about Wrath?" (Answer: Summer.)

What this does is determine if the person has been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the game they're applying to. It was easier on Aether because the racial theme files were maybe 10 pages if you printed them all out, 15 if you included the stat system, but it said, "Hey, are you ready? Do you need more help?" And if the player did need more help, they would reach out to the newbie channel, where someone would respond without handing them the answer outright. "Check out this page. The answer's there," they would say.

So we have told the newbie that 1) people on this game will help you out, 2) but they won't hand-hold, and 3) how to use the on-line resources. Really, the more I think about it the more brilliant I think it was, even if most of that brilliance was by accident.

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The second thing was the recommendation or "recc" system. Most of us have seen "recc" systems before, but how Aether did it was like this:

You could always +recc someone for an awesome scene, but only once per month for that player. At the end of the month, a gathering of ten players (this is important) and one staffer got together and would see all the recc's for a certain character. They would then vote "meh, yes, ohmygodyes" based on the comments people made for that player that month. Based on that, the character would get 0-3 XP (including percentages) based on how their peers voted.

This meant that different people every month would see how awesome people thought other players were. There were the occasional negatives, but since staff could always see who submitted the recc (the peer voting group couldn't), they could advise the current vote group to avoid it or that it was legit.

One benefit is that we always knew what was going on from the player perspective. The better benefit was so did other players. They were always exposed to the positives.

That's not to say that there weren't hiccups and drawbacks, but this system worked exactly as intended as long as it could be maintained. It won't be for every game, or even most games, but it was glorious while it worked.

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And I'm pretty cruel toward systems that don't do what they intend.

@faraday

At the time I missed that you asked how to better describe theme, and meant to agree with you that "western" is not a theme and therefore we needed to describe it better.

Let me start here:

"Just pick one and be clear about what you expect," you might say. Great idea, but it's *hard( to pin down a theme with that specificity, especially when every player is coming to it with a different expectation.

How to do theme better: I agree with @Ghost. The World of Darkness core books (Vampire, Changeling, etc.) give a list of various themes you could be going for, in the literary sense. I feel that this is more critical than setting, because it informs setting more than setting informs theme. This game is for playing X.

"Commander Adama runs a light ship but expects loyalty. His crew lets off steam, but anyone who goes too far can expect a few days in the brig out of the action they desperately crave. Everyone seems hungry to not just survive, but win, and win at any cost."

But in the immortal words of whomever said them, no game survives first contact with the players. You have to keep tweaking expectations and presentation; it's one of the reasons I'm so hard on games which don't clarify what they want to new players.

"In ThenoWestern, you are a European-American in the alien world of the newly explored, lightly settled West, where the natives are trying--and effectively--to stop your Manifest Destiny." You may not know much about the setting, but you know what's expected of you when you create a character, and what kinds of things you're probably going to be ending up RPing.

I agree with @Ghost as well; setting the literary theme will also be important. For ThenoWestern, it's: High Adventure at High Tea, served with an Intrigue Biscotti.

Am I describing Castle Falkenstin or Space: 1889? It doesn't matter, because you already have ideas for this game, don't you.

Whether or not my idea of what should be run and yours mix is an entirely different issue, but that's why you talk to players, that's why you try to keep things simple, that's why you NPC higher-ups to tell the Captains that they have gone over the line whipping their pilots.

And so forth.

@Insomnia said:

Don't forget to take your power cores with you when you leave it somewhere, or your settlers will hop in it and take it for a joyride.

This means powerful NPCs, which is great because NPCs don't use up power cores, but when the segment of the map gets unloaded the power armor disappears.

I think people will have a relatively good idea how they will be accepted within a week of logging on, but it has to do not with the players but with the characters. The latter is why we still have the infinitely annoying question/response of "What should I play"/"Whatever you want". This is obviously not true, but we usuallydon't have a better answer.

The games with good social binding seem to have two things going on from them. First is that there is little to no antipathy among staff. If there is stress in staff, players will feel it, usually because staff has friends in the player base and it will get out, but also because a stressed staff works differently than a relaxed staff. For one, a relaxed staff is more into the game, and nothing helps a game more than staff being interested in it, and nothing kills a game like staff losing interest even if they are still going through the motions.

The second is that all new players are introduced to the game. I want to mention the AetherMUX quiz and casual newbie channel again. They also had reccs read by other players, so everyone had a chance to see everyone saying good things about everyone else. The game did not just expect a positive atmosphere, it created one.

It was also easy to make a character. It was easy going from idea to grid. There was no wrong character stat (except maybe the Sylvan race, and we spent a lot of time trying to come up with ways to fix that). The grid was small enough that everyone could gravitate toward a scene, and the culture of the game's setting were not exclusionary.

I was a dark and brooding bastard when I coded here, but today my heart years to return to this, for people to make games with a focus on drawing people into telling stories. Not just open-world RPG systems with rooms.

@faraday

If the problem is that we are describing genre and calling it theme, then someone needs to press them on the point.

The slapfight continues because theme is not described well enough, and most of the games we play are pretty open-world. Without a solid foundation, the staff is seen as being pushy or bossy and not in control of the interpretation.

I left an 1800s western game when the players were having a charity auction, one of the beloved prostitutes was up for bid, and people started throwing numbers in the thousands of dollars.

As this game was not in New York City and those people were not rail or trade barons, I watched for a little longer, made an excuse to do homework, and never returned.

Both the theme and setting were ignored. Sure they had fun, but I wanted theme and setting. Ah well.

@Miss-Demeanor said:

I have full X-01 Power Armor and a modded Gatling Laser. I fear no Deathclaws!

The only time I use power armor against Deathclaws are at game start, where you have to, and the Glowing Sea, because it was easier to traverse that way.

I survived being chased by a Deathclaw into two other mobs. Had one of them been Super Mutants maybe I would have been in trouble.

I wasn't in Survival Mode because I don't play these games for combat, and that's all it's for. Fallout 3's Survival Mode is far more interesting, because there aren't beds every five fucking feet, and radiation is something to be genuinely afraid of. Also, guns break, and even slightly not perfect weapons have worse stats and take longer to load and argh stress stress stress!

I miss that.

Define "time"; be 100% accurate.

This is how this and every discussion about impartiality and fairness feels to me.

At the very least, somebody is getting screwed no matter what.

@Groth said:

@Nein said:

I've never felt that generating RP and being ICly active should be the yardstick by which leadership value is measured. Is it imporant? Absolutely. Should an egocentric petty tyrant and his lackeys remain in control of a group just because they produce RP? Hell no.

What would you use as the criteria for leadership positions?

Pon farr.

Now that t-shirts don't always have physical tags, I don't always know if I'm putting them on forwards.

Psycho Hose-Beast.

I, er, can't describe it in a way that gives it the justice it means except perhaps by imagining what a game would be like if a Drama Llama were in charge.

@Sovereign

Have you? Have you really? Well okay, if you insist.

I will concede this is what you mean, but they aren't the same thing. Not by a long-shot. A hard-ass is a kind of willful person, a petty tyrant is a kind of willful person, but even then it doesn't answer the kind of personality that runs games well.

I think this is because there isn't one. Being willing to make hard calls is critical, is about as far as I'm willing to agree.

@Sovereign said:

At this point, I treat it a lot like folks who say "I hate drama" - baby, you make more drama than a playwright.

You're being a little dramatic, yourself. I understand; I also use hyperbole for drama's sake, and I probably should stop.

@Sovereign, I like @Ganymede's answer better as it isn't just "be a hard-ass" which believe me, many PHBs are hard-asses. He (she, I still have no idea) also explains what "reasonable" means, which is otherwise a problem because "reasonable" is not a universal standard. Hell, "adult" is far more a universal standard than "reasonable". So by cutting down the uncertainty, Ganymede makes a far more understandable solution. If people can understand a procedure, they are less likely to object or find ways to object to it.

You also don't have to be a hard-ass to implement them. In the brief time being under Ganymede's staffdom, she (he?) never had to be a hard-ass. I thought some of his ideas were silly and she couldn't get them implemented on the game because of player push-back, but none of them were crime-and-punishment issues; they were game design issues.

@faraday's code works because it registers itself, so while it does have dependencies, it's going to warn you ahead of time.

@Lithium
In th e final season of the cartoon, The Gang covertly goes to see a play about themselves, because why not. They are horrified with how the world sees them (no wonder; it was propaganda) but at the end their summary was, "It was ... alright? Good special effects, though."

Officially the Avatar creators don't say anything about the movie. I think this is their unofficial response.

I started this thread in the "anything goes" forums to be more fair to these people, or willfully open myself to more criticism here:

http://musoapbox.net/topic/762/generations-of-darkness-only-staff-may-sass-players