My issue would be more tied to IC secrets and full backgrounds than mechanics. There's stuff I think is just more fun to reveal in play. I've had generally good experiences on open sheet games and think they solve a lot of problems, but I haven't become a blanket 'these are the best in every situation' person.
@tek
This is pretty standard behavior from this dude. Very sorry you had to experience it. Forewarned is forearmed for those reading, at least.
@mietze said in Open Sheets?:
I will say that I think games where there's a culture of open stats seem to (in my observance) have a more consistently high quality of rp/player on them; but I think that's largely due to self selection. The players who want to win against other players at any cost and cant help themselves are going to self select out.
I think you get different kinds of assholes and bad behavior. It certainly cuts down on the nakedly-obvious system workers/manipulators, but I'm not sure how much of a problem they are in pure PvE games anyway, whether sheets are open or not. I still feel like I see plenty of pouting and dick measuring over skills, it just manifests in different ways.
The main things in favor or open sheets for me are the ease of PrP running and the ease of chargen for newbies it promotes (since you can just point to a character type and basically say 'copy that'). So I do agree it has positive cultural elements, even though I don't think it impacts RP quality as much as the PvE versus PvP split does.
I've played characters I loved more, but the one I probably had the most pure fun with was Rebekkah on the old Steel & Stone GoT MUSH. She was an 80-year-old dowager who existed only to snark at her grandchildren and complain, and was my blatant rip-off of Olenna Tyrell. Was a blast.
@apos said in Open Sheets?:
I consider good players going too far and handicapping themselves as a more consistent but less noticeable problem than bad actors.
I came up on pure consent games and I confess this, along with the attitude of implied superiority "roleplay not ROLLplay" you got sometimes, was one of my frustrations with them. It's part of why I actively want some kind of arbitration mechanism so much now, even if it's just a coin-flip tool players can voluntarily run among themselves. They aren't good or bad, they're just different, and I think players who've been in environments with heavy OOC secrecy where everything has mechanical arbitration tend to over-correct and assume they're a utopia.
@cupcake said in Characters You Enjoyed Playing:
Ygraine @BSO. Another free spirit, Yggy was a tall, freckled, blonde braided farm girl who became the best damn ECO (fite me) on Orion, who often ended up giving people life advice.
Yggy! She was a great deal of fun, and I really enjoyed Yggy/Phin. Them as buddies (loooooooong before they ever hooked up) really helped me hook into the character.
Phin@BSO is definitely one of my favorite characters, in a way that sneaks up on me every time I think back on how much I enjoyed him. He started as kind of a toss-off generic Viper pilot Lee Adama riff (with Zac Efron's face, for lulz). I wasn't sure if I was in the mood to MU right then, and I apped him because I wanted to play with a handful of people/because staff had let me and a buddy of mine create twins on a BSG game, which was low-key trolling that sort of amused me. I had no real expectations. I ended up getting really into him, and he slowly came to life inside my head in ways that were really rewarding to play. If I were to try and rank my favorite characters, he'd easily make the Top 5 (maybe higher, some days), well above characters with backgrounds I liked more initially, or who had concepts I was more excited about. That doesn't happen for me often (false starts with concepts I'm jazzed about are much more frequent) and it was an experience I look back on extremely fondly.
@mietze said in Open Sheets?:
Maybe that is why on the whole I have found a better caliber of ooc player behaviors on games with open sheets, they have all tended to be smaller with a better sense of ooc community.
I definitely think game size makes it easier to foster a certain type of game culture than anything else, since it's a lot easier to encourage/enforce the kind of environment you want on 20 players rather than 100+. I'm sorta curious how open sheets would play on a mega-game. They tend to be environments where player trust is harder to foster, since you can go months without interacting with a decent portion of the playerbase, and you get more niches of people holing up to play their own version of the game. I suspect it'd weird me out on a game like Arx, where stuff like your secrets are part of your sheet and are in some cases not things I terribly want randos to know, but I probably wouldn't care so much about sharing purely mechanical/non-magical stuff like the FS3 games tend to be.
I look at the Twitter-style journals as something akin to how our respected American Founding Father's started newspapers specifically to trash each other. And any number of other historical cases you could name. Leaflets and letters as vehicles for gossip/quippy asides seems like one of the less fantastical things on the game (lack of printing presses aside, which strikes an odd note in my brain but I've accepted).
@Runescryer
Yeah I think you'll get a DIFFERENT playerbase with Ares and FATE but not necessarily a smaller one. Though you can never tell what people will rush the gates for and what they'll be meh on. FATE and OC make a game more appealing to me but I cannot predict people at all.
This sounds really neat, and I'm always excited for non-WoD urban fantasy. I'd give it a look at least.
I said in the Peeves thread that I feel no compelling need for one and don't utilize them as a social area even on games that have them. I use channels and either get a room of my own PC's to idle in or stick them in a Quiet room.
@arkandel
Yeah, the term GOMO/Gold of My Own comes from the Pern phenomena of players upset they didn't get the recognition (in gold dragon form) they wanted going off to form a game where they did. It's a thing in this hobby.
I think this needs to be quoted here. You can't tease something like that without going all the way.
@surreality said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:
@nightshade ...because maybe you're looking for something more like an RPI or a MOO, which is not the MUSH/MUX hobby's fault.
I mean, this person's being ultra abrasive and anti-sensible and I'm not really bothering to read his posts, so it's not what I'm responding to per se.
That said, I think viewing codebases as proxies for game experience/culture actually is one of the problems in this hobby. There are MOOs that are entirely MUSH-like, beyond the code base. There's also no reason an MUSH or MUX can't be made to be heavily object/code-oriented (the TGG combat code is my go-to example of this, just due to my own experience).
My hope is that Ares and Evennia as less obscure coding platforms will enable people to make more of all kinds of games, but I fear the attitude of 'oh, it's an X Codebase game, not for me' will persist there as well.
@faraday said in BSG: Unification:
I don't know quite where the sweet spot is for campaign length, but a frequent change of scenery is definitely something I think is key to the game's concept. The freedom of being able to go different places was the primary reason I picked a First Cylon War setting over the traditional Second War one.
Yeah, this is what's always made me REALLY want to dig into the First Cylon War as a setting. The holocaust of the reimagined series is INCREDIBLY compelling, but it makes those games difficult to sustain. You always have to kind of reach to find excuses for new PCs to rando show up (though we managed on Cerb and other games), and it cuts off a huge amount of the setting. I love how on BSU you can treat Tauron/Picon/Canceron/Etc. as actual planets that are being tangibly fought for, not just blasted wastes people occasionally get sentimental about.
This is my primary issue with travel wait times, as @Lotherio puts it. I'm perfectly happy to RP a month of road adventures with an active group (I have done voluntary road trips on games with no enforced travel and they're fun). But when everyone else in your ship/party is inactive and you're cut off from the rest of the game for a week, what do you do?
If you want a single-focus game, you have to be pretty hardcore about telling players to app within that focus (I have learned this lesson from frustrating past experience). I personally don't see this as limiting. It's being clear about the kind of stories you'd like to tell and what you'd like to provide for players. I don't actually like games that try to be ALL THE THINGS and, unless they have a huge playerbase, I feel like that attitude becomes self-defeating.
@mietze
People get away with as much as they think they can get away with, in a lot of respects, and the anonymity of online interaction is pretty much just that magnified. Some of this is my being jaded from working IRL in fraud investigation but...people pull some shit if they think there are no consequences. And, by the same token, a lot of them will shape up and be just fine the first time they're slapped and made aware NO THIS IS NOT OK.
IDK, I think most people are OK. Not fabulous but OK. For better or worse, I don't think I'm much different on the interwebs than I am IRL, but I do think the absence of an immediate punch in the face makes people push the line farther than they would in the flesh. We ain't much different at our cores, though. If someone's engaged in manipulation and gaslighting online, I assume it's the same sort of warning sign as it would be if I found out someone was an animal abuser in real life. You probably won't go to jail, but this person is also probably lacking in some major humanity areas and distancing is necessary.
@Cupcake
Just co-signing this. I feel like I lucked into Deepwood (and Grayson as a whole) kind of randomly when I took Esoka off the roster. Samantha (and Tikva, Rymarr, Zhayla, and more of the Grayson players than I can name) really helped me find my feet and not feel lost and overwhelmed on what can feel like a huge game. I find the way Riven is positioned within the theme as a blended old nobility/Prodigal house really rich and ripe for exploration if people want to dig into it.
@roz said in What is your turning point?:
@thatguythere Yeah, that's usually what it comes down to me. I hate the game of "if I take this scene now, I might lock myself out of RP I'd really like later when this other player comes online/becomes available, but if I don't take this scene now, I might end up with no RP at all for the night." IT'S A STUPID GAME. It sucks and I hate it.
Yeah not to mention...trying to figure out how to say this without going off on a mean ranting tangent about my fellow players. I am a person who's pretty punctual and tries to respect people's time. I think people who RP with me can back me up on this. I don't get this in return very often. I've gotten to the point where I don't expect it, but it still bugs the fuck out of me. I mean, shit happens, but with some people, asking them NOT to flake on you seems like a huge imposition.
If somebody does show up vaguely when they say they will and proactively follows up with me for scenes in kind? 10/10, RUN ACROSS MEADOW AS SOARING MUSIC PLAYS, FRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEND.