Posts made by Three-Eyed Crow

@krmbm
Oh, yeah, I don' t think a MU with canon characters or in the Rand al'Thor period of the books is workable, but the general setting is a good one.

@krmbm said in Wheel of Time MU(SH|X):

With Ares in beta... any word on how this is shaping up? I'm on book 3 on Audible ATM, and it's got the hankering going.

You may not feel this way when you hit book...beyond 4 (I think 8 was my breaking point), but it's still a great RP setting nonetheless!

@nightshade said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

Since Arx has about 400 players or something, I would say it is also what mushdom was missing. Look at what players love and flock to, then do it well.

I feel like part of what Arx has done is tap into a Venn Diagram of RPers on the internet that most other games don't bother with. It's attracting MUSHers, but also people with primarily RPI MUD backgrounds, and it's satisfying them both because it supplies enough things both audience are comfortable with. It's both the extremely positive answer to, and the cautionary tale of because of how its population has ballooned, the question of: what happens when you tap into a non-MUSH online RP audience?

Other games who've tapped into the Tumblr or forum RP crowd are probably a less drastic example of this.

@thenomain
There's room for more. Some of us have never played on a WoD MU quite happily. Some things about different games are similar, some are different. Some succeed, some fail. Some are well-implemented, some are poorly implemented. I don't think it has too much to do with WoD or not-WoD.

@kanye-qwest said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

@faraday Ok but that's not what I was referring to. I meant the type of social rp that ignores a setting element. It's having 'pizza and movie night' in an apocalypse. It's having fifteen outfits and doing a secret santa in a fantasy garbage world where everyone is starving.

This was my issue with the zombie game No Return, admittedly. There was a disconnect between what the game was billed as, zombie survival, and what a lot of people ended up playing, which sometimes felt more like RP camping trip with interpersonal drama. I do think the persistent setting and 24/7 RP set-up of a MU environment is going to be a detriment to that kind of theme. Not sure how you solve this on a public game of any size, though RPI/MUD-like environment elements would probably help.

@bored said in Spotlight.:

I think MU players of any... veteran degree are going to understand that being the star all the time, or even ever (if we're talking Luke level), is impossible and would be quite happy to settle for something along the lines of the GoT secondary cast.

You would think so! And yet I can think of multiple examples of people who had roles everyone in this thread would consider "starring" in plots that have complained bitterly about not getting enough spotlight when someone else got attention (and you know what, folks, when you do this in a semi-open setting, do not assume it won't get around, you are wrong). I mean, those are the unreasonable people you can't make happy no matter what, but I don't think they're as much a minority as one would like to think.

@apos said in Spotlight.:

100% the main cause of cliquishness in the hobby is people wanting to limit their exposure to microaggressions and griping like that. This hobby imo is powered entirely by enthusiasm of participants. It is incredibly easy for just a few persistently negative people to pretty much gut a game faster than a Custodius could ever dream of doing so.

Yeah, I'll admit this BS is the primary thing that makes me jaded about the hobby. I think the cheaters and harassers and true bad actors are anomalies. They're terrible, but you ban them and, problem done. But you're going to have to deal with jealousy every day, even from players who are mostly OK a lot of the time. You're going to have to deal with pettiness every day. This stuff is human but it also just really wears me down. I do this for fun, why am I bothering with these people? I tend not to bother when I know what BS awaits me and I'll confess it's changed the way I approach playing, even though I still enjoy it.

@faraday
My CAG character on BS Cerberus nixed the killboard specifically because I did not want to deal with the OOC drama that comes with it.

This made IC sense for a handful of character reasons, but...that was the major impetus, not going to deny it.

This is what's frustrating to me about this stuff, because these complaints are incredibly burn-out inducing when they're about the little things. Oh, there were complaints that a person took part in a game at my party? Whelp, I don't terribly want to run parties anymore, because clearly doing ANYTHING gets you flack. Yeah, this stuff is silly, but so much of it's ABOUT the silly stuff that it takes away from legitimate complaints about game balance and favoritism.

@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 feel like a lot of this comes down to the old issue of getting enough GMs/STs to support your players. You can try to mitigate some of this with encouraging player GMs and automating some stuff, but STs are always going to be the attraction to a story game, and demanding they do 100 things in 1 day is neither fair nor reasonable.

@pyrephox said in Spotlight.:

But, y'know, I think it might be an interesting idea for smallish games to keep track of players and how many plots they've 'starred' in, and just make an effort to reach out to players OOC if they haven't starred in many, or any, and just see if there's something they'd LIKE to do.

This kind of gets at a question I have: what does "starred in" a plot mean? Obviously if you were a prominent PC in a major storyline who slew a big bad, that was a starring role. But there's a lot of angst about the GM paying attention to someone for literally one pose in a scene. Or even something as inconsequential as playing a game at a PC-run event (I have literally heard complaints about this, including games for which there were no prizes). I think staff should be mindful of this stuff and tracking involvement/focus in some kind of quantifiable way is a good idea, but I've heard complaints about "attention hogging" that really do seem to amount to "stop doing all things."

@zz
Janus (coder friend of ours) could probably make one.

Like, Evennia and Ares have the potential, I feel like, to have a ton of plug-and-play features in a few years, if developers take an interest in them.

@auspice said in What's missing in MUSHdom?:

Well, FS3 is an Ares module, it's true, so stripping out FS3... It's possible it'd be doable. What I love about Ares is that it's an out-of-the-box MU*.

The impression I've gotten is that it's easily doable, you just need to have something to replace it with, and there's not a D&D or Harry Potter magic or whatever plug-in. Yet. My assumption is that somebody who knows Ruby could code something up in the same way someone who knows python could code something up in Evennia, but that still requires developers interested in it.

@thenomain said in Make it fun for Me!:

That is, this is me reminding everyone that people "win" at games for different reasons. Griefing is the opposite of @Three-Eyed-Crow's "telling the best story", and is how some people win.

Sure, but I think this is a class that's going to be pretty dissatisfied by cooperative MUs that don't have a heavy PvP element (games, for the record, which I don't play often enough to comment on them much). Playing the game you're on, not the game you want it to be, is part of what having fun with the game entails.

MUs are social games.

This is a basic and obvious statement, but I feel like the failure of players to grasp this, or to really internalize it, is at the heart of a lot of non-fun in this hobby. You cannot one-shot this shit. You cannot do it in a corner by yourself. At least, not in any long-term or with any amount of depth. You 'win' these games by telling the best story, and sometimes that means ceding the stage to someone else or taking a loss that dramatically rich down-the-line. These are not the first instincts of most people and we aren't good at it, so we fail to 'win' a lot of the time. Gotta keep in mind what the win is and keep trying, though. You attain the happy medium when you find GMs and RP partners who trade off the load and let everyone share in winning/the best story. This is the ideal I feel like we should all strive for. It's hard some days. Gotta try and be better, though, because that's the only way this works.

3.14 IS PI DAY Y'ALLS. Many deals on pizza things here and I'm assuming elsewhere.

I will be getting my discounted pizza. Will it have pineapple? Idk.

A good white pizza with spinach and garlic is fucking amazing and a frequent go-to of mine on the couple meatless days I do a week (these are never particularly healthy days, and so I enjoy them all the more).

ETA: I'm pro pineapple on pizza as well, though usually want to combine it with Canadian bacon and bbq sauce.

@ganymede said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

Frankly, I like FS3 because the experts don't always win. I can't tell you how many times I saw Spectre missing or not damaging Cylons, and Trash Panda miraculously made it through a frontal assault. It does what Faraday wants it to: simulate a modern combat situation. And it does it really well.

Yeah, same. If anything, FS3 tends to make lower-skilled characters more effective than a lot of systems (thereby kind of massaging the difference between them and higher-skilled/more veteran characters, which is a frustration other players have with it, but that's not the complaint).

This sort of gets at...how much is a dice system responsible for making players feel validated and important to the story? And this is not a minor thing. This is maybe the most important responsibility a GM has. But it's always going to be about a player's feelings, what they want (and don't always communicate wanting particularly well), and how well or how poorly an ST is balancing their stories and doing plots that a variety of types can be involved in. Players also have to be honest with themselves about what they want to play and...play that thing (as the game allows). But, hopefully, we don't only feel validated when we get a critical success.

@seraphim73 said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

@the-sands said in Game Design: Avoiding Min-Maxing:

However, [WoD/CoD] the system in use in most places.

I would bet that it's not. The plurality of places, perhaps, but not the majority. It's just MSB that is soaked in WoD.

Damn right it's not. It waxes and wanes but there are a LOT of games posters here have no idea exist and that drum along quite happily (myself included, but I'll own my relative ignorance to All the Internet). WoD as the assumed default game makes me Hulk rage.

I don't mind (or, rather, I numbly accept and try to exit the threads in which they take place) WoD tangents here because they're inevitable but Christ a lot of people don't play WoD quite happily.

This sounds really neat, and I'm always excited for non-WoD urban fantasy. I'd give it a look at least.