Those who RPed with Seanan McGuire don’t tend to speak of it.

@Solstice said in Your first game?:

In hindsight, I was really waaaaay too young to be on the wild west internet of 1996

oof, saaaame.

I am not quite sure I remember which one was first, but it was either The Lion King MU* or Heroes and Villains.

hilariously I tried to apply to Project Infinity for literal years and one of the appstaff replied to one application something like “I just want to say, your writing has improved so much” and I was too embarrassed to admit that it was because I had been like 13 when I first started trying, lol

i think you’ve got three dials: game size, nuance/specificity, and staff involvement. Cranking any of these up or down is going to affect the others. You can (and should! if you want!) make a game that is highly specific in a historical or fictional setting, but doing so is going to turn down max players and probably increase staff involvement in direct relation. You can turn down staff involvement and let your players mostly self-police if the guardrails are broad and high enough, until that player size gets to a certain limit.

I think you can pull off most any kind of niche or historical setting if you are willing to accept and spend your time curating a small and like minded player base.

@somasatori Keep this up and people are going to expect you to start a game. 🤣

This is a community-building issue.

Okay, yeah, probably you can never have outright let’s-murder-each-other-on-sight factions and have it work. But why would you want to? If they only interact to fight, there is no reason for the opposing group to be PCs.

But stuff like “Green apple Fossoways hate red apple Fossoways and they’re each trying to be the ruling branch of the house,” and the deal where everybody’s trying to steal the McGuffin from whoever has it right now, can be fine fun.

It needs a supportive community to be fine, though. It works on private games because everybody there thinks everybody else’s feelings count and actively wants every other player to have a good time. When this trust is broken things crumble.

Which is no surprise. There are big differences between:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “Yeah, the dice were cruel to you! But that was great, loved the way you played it out, I had a blast.And you’ll get yours once you climb out of that hoiy-water-contaminated well.”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “I understand that you’re very upset. In this essay I will explain how you are wrong and a problem…”

And:

Dracula: “Well shit.”

Van Helsing: “It sucks to suck.”

Also, yeah. There’s gonna be drama. There’s just gonna be drama. Making some space for the dramas of RPG-related fee-fees is part of gaming. Gamerunners and players can draw a line about how much space and what kind of expression of ye feels. But “never express any kind of upset about the game or your interactions with others on it” isn’t reasonable. Games nobody cares are not good games. You want players to be invested. Passions will rise. Characters don’t have to die for passions to rise.

Players in general and game runners in particular really ought to try to avoid drawing that line at who’s drama rather than what kind of drama. 

Drawing the line at a who is how you get bullshit like it not being ‘drama’ when Abelard raises a “Bridget refuses to compromise in RP!,” fuss, but when Bridget replies, “You refused to turn off your camera, you were obviously bluffing, I’m more afraid of proposed-betrayee I am of your threat, and I don’t even have the information you were trying to blackmail me to get,” somehow Bridget is the drama-creating problem.

@Jennkryst said in Character Death:

Taking a moment to think about it and remember that the L5R 20 questions includes ‘how should your character die’ because the idea of death is always in the back of their minds… Im wondering if that is a factor in the L5R MUs I’ve seen not doing terribly great for too long, or if addressing this and everyone going into it knowing there is supposed to be an almost romanticized view on a good/noble death… if that will somehow help it out? I dunno.

three cartoon characters are chained to a wall with the word death written on the bottom

I keep glancing here, and keep meaning to make a joke about how the address involves gaslighting, but then I don’t do it, so now you all get to see that train of thought.

@helvetica The menchies!!!

@MisterBoring I’m not sure if it does, but if so, it would probably take someone with more technical skill than I have to make it work. 🙂

I think I’ve got character generation where I want it now, so I decided to try modifying the dice plugin for the game. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

It keeps the core functionality of the original dice plugin; you can still roll whatever you want, but I added a ‘Roll DMarvel’ checkbox. When you check it, the plugin rolls DMarvel(3d6, but one die is special: rolling a 1 counts as a 6 and gives you a Fantastic result).

Roll Screen:
32bd7150-94c4-493f-9641-e5f02bad679f-image.png

Result:
33026141-b86b-43a0-bec5-e840407490a5-image.png

@Pavel said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Muse said in Minigames in MUSHes:

@Pavel Or maybe a self limiting factor, like clues know how long since the last clue and will stay in hiding until it’s time again.

Just let me have my slap-upside-head tool okay. 😞

Fiiiiiine, but only because I’m a sucker for a sad face.

@Jenn if this was discord I’d respond with a laughing emoji. Holy shit my brain is rotted

A peeve I have is sometimes staff -try- to disperse plot hooks, but like… end up giving three plot hooks all to people in the same insular group, failing to solve the bottleneck problem at all when they proceed to treat a gamewide plot like it’s their own personal treat.

@dvoraen said in MUing Snacks:

OH NO THEY’RE BACK AGAIN

@Tez is who they warned us about in math class.

a man in an orange sweater is pushing a shopping cart full of groceries

@Hobbie said in Best Games with Roster Characters?:

alpha strike in a Nova.

Something something disco ball.

Anyway travel times alone means everyone is probably part of the same mercenary group, or it’s gotta be set on Solaris or something. To say nothing of potential ‘whoops, cockpit was hit, you died, re-roll’ occurrences.

alt text

@RedRocket said in pvp vs pvp:

If the reason for the attack is lame

There was so much drivel that I ghosted right past this but jesus christ it’s a hell of a thing to double down, triple down after someone has politely asked you “hey can you don’t?” and admin has already had to use the mod voice.

Honestly, guy, leap into the sun.

@Jennkryst Yeah – those games were all before Nemesis was released, and chose to ignore it and part ways with the canon timeline.

There was one good thing about the time-travelling murder hobos, which is that everyone OOCly knew their secret, since logs of their actions were shared on the game wiki. Contrary to the arguments of OOC masq proponents about how impossible this is, the players kept it OOC knowledge. Some managed to figure it out IC in purely IC ways. Many players thought it was pretty shite game-writing to restrict knowledge of and action regarding a universal threat to a small group of PCs, and had no desire to support or cooperate with that element of the plot, but still I have no recollection of cheating being a problem.

Forked off pvp stuff by request to https://brandmu.day/topic/583/pvp-vs-pvp

@Superbia Just be aware that FS3 is not very “crunchy” and so does not have a lot of the kinds of systems you’d typically find in a TTRPG. Like for Mechs in Battletech - there’s no concept of heat, ammo, range, critical hits, etc.

For a light-touch story driven thing, FS3 vehicles would surely do fine. It’s just not going to resemble any of the “mech wargame” systems.

@Prototart said in What happened, man?:

i don’t believe you

Do it for her